User:Christopher Thomas

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I am on intermittent wikipedia-sabbatical (latest starting Spring 2007). I periodically check for messages left in my talk page.

Check this tool to see if I'm active.

1 Biography
2 Editing To-Do List
- 2.1 Selected noteworthy edits
- 2.2 Selected image contributions
3 Pseudoscience Windmill-Tilting
4 Essays and scratchwork
5 See also

[edit] Biography

I am an academic who dabbles in coding, electronics, and bizzare design challenges when not haunting the university scaring undergrads.

Hobbies include reading fiction and non-fiction, contemplating math and physics problems, karate, and pencil-and-paper role-playing games.

I am currently a PhD student at York University, Toronto, Canada.

I am a developer with the ArdReil project on SourceForge, producing an open source clone of the DOS game "Anacreon".

My contributions to Wikipedia primarily involve computer games and physics.

[edit] Editing To-Do List

I track Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics, and fix entries listed on an occasional basis. Articles on my to-do list are shown below:

Nothing on the list at present, as I'm on sabbatical.

If you want me to look at a specific article, please add a comment to my talk page. If it isn't already on PNA/Physics, it should be listed there first, so that others can take a look at it as well.

[edit] Selected noteworthy edits

Antimatter rocket, April 2007. Full rewrite of the article (diff).

Event horizon, June/July 2006. Full rewrite of the article (diff) (discussion).

Degenerate matter, February 2006. Partial rewrite and stub-filling (diff).

Neutronium, November 2005. Rewrote (diff).

Negative energy, May 2005, November 2005. Replaced gibberish with a disambiguation page (diff). I'd originally redirected to exotic matter; I changed this to a disambiguation page after a sufficiently strong case was made for doing so.

[edit] Selected image contributions

Main article: User:Christopher Thomas/Image contributions

Image:Bh-light-cones-1.png and Image:Bh-radar-radar-pulse.png, December 2005. Intended as placeholders for better versions of these figures at black hole.
Image:Hcube_fold.gif, June 2006. Animation of folding and unfolding of hypercube and cube nets, in response to a question on talk:tesseract.
Image:Event-horizon-particle.png, June 2006. Spacetime diagram of a uniformly accelerating particle, and the light cone of an event that's outside its event horizon, for a proposed rewritten version of event horizon.
Image:Gr-temp-positive.gif, Image:Gr-temp-negative.gif, Image:Gr-temp-surfaces.png, July 2006. Animations and diagrams showing how world lines converge in positively curved spacetime and diverge in negatively curved spacetime.
Image:Aerovator-forces-polar.png, July 2006. Force diagram for a segment of an aerovator ribbon.
Image:Ftl-time-travel-equivalence.gif, March 2007. Animated, subtitled spacetime diagram showing the equivalence of FTL travel and time travel under special relativity. Warning: large file.

[edit] Pseudoscience Windmill-Tilting

One of my hobbies has been to stem the proliferation of strongly-biased pseudoscience pages on Wikipedia. Attempting to delete the pages tends to fail for pseudoscience that's well-enough publicized to be Notable. Whether deletion succeeds or fails, adherents of the pseudoscience in question tend to find ways to return it to Wikipedia. Instead, I try to produce Neutral Point of View articles that accurately summarize the pseudoscience's core tenets (satisfying its supporters), while making clear its departures from mainstream science (satisfying its detractors).

[edit] Articles that I've successfully revised

Anti-gravity, May 2005 (diff covering the rewrite) (this article has since changed beyond all recognition)

[edit] Articles that I'm presently attempting to revise

None, at present.

[edit] Articles that I've failed to revise

Harmonics Theory (sane revision archived at User:Christopher Thomas/Harmonics Theory) (deleted article later replaced with a useful redirect)
Autodynamics (sane revision archived at User:Christopher Thomas/Autodynamics)

[edit] Articles that have been deleted

Note: Do not recreate these articles; they were deleted with due process and undeletion is a violation of Wikipedia policy.

Harmonics Theory (original author couldn't accept any rewrite; article deleted as non-notable) (replaced with a useful redirect)
Chaotic gravitational waves (deleted as original research)

[edit] Useful links

[edit] Tools

[edit] Wikipedia policy pages

[edit] Essays and scratchwork

Miscellaneous essays and drafts. Included mostly for my own ease of reference. Please don't modify.

Suggestions for staying sane while editing Wikipedia. This is why I (usually) don't hate editing after being here this long.

brain-dump of suggested colonization approaches for the ThinkStarship project on WikiBooks.

[edit] See also

My work page.
My non-work page.
My LiveJournal page.
Vision Sensor Laboratory page. My PhD work is with this group.
AENAO Group page on power-aware microarchitectures. My MASc work was with this group.
SourceForge projects I'm involved with: