User:Nickshanks

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“Here I am standing in a street with mud and a cow” — Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia.^[1]

Nicholas George Shanks was born on 1 May 1981 at the Queen's Medical Centre in Nottingham, to a Scottish father and Hungarian mother. He was raised in West Bridgford before moving at age 18 to Hatfield to attend the University of Hertfordshire where he read Astrophysics.

Now a software developer for Boinx Software, of Bavaria, Nicholas writes applications for the Apple Macintosh and wastes his spare time reading BBC News and learning languages (Gàidhlig, Latina, 日本語, Русский inter alia). Besides astrophysics, computing and linguistics, his interests include archaeology, paleontology, paleoanthropology, human and robotic spaceflight, terraforming, females, natural disasters and a plethora of other topics. His musical tastes include Bruce Springsteen, The Police, Die Prinzen, Chris Isaak, Jefferson Airplane, Peter Gabriel, The Steve Miller Band and U2 amongst many many others.

He is also known to contribute significantly to the Vicipædia Latina, and sometimes must fight for his country.

Contents:
1 Languages 2 Major Contributions 3 Images 4 Articles of Interest 5 External Links

[edit] Languages

en	This user is a native speaker of English.

de-1

Dieser Benutzer hat grundlegende Deutschkenntnisse.

fr-1

Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français.

la-1

Hic usor simplici latinitate contribuere potest.

hu-½

This user only knows a few words in Hungarian.

For anyone who's interested, I have an RP‐like non‐rhotic East Midlands accent with linking and intrusive [ɹ], and almost exclusively use a short /æ/ in words like grass, path, laugh, dance; exceptions being aunt, can't, half and calf. I read wh as /w/ in almost all cases, except where distinctions are significant (which witch?), and exhibit partial and sometimes inconsistant Yod dropping for example in lute, suit but not new, dune or Zeus. The words chew and juice may be pronounced both with and without /j/ with no apparent (to me) reason why I would choose one over the other, and I more frequently coalesce the noun tune to /ʧuːn/ than not; the verb to tune is never coalesced. I have written an IPA transcription of myself reading the above passage and made an audio recording of myself reading the passage from the English Speech Accent Archive.

[edit] Major Contributions

[edit] Computing

Apple Advanced Typography – wrote article
Apple typography – added section on Apple Advanced Typography
Comparison of web browsers – added two browsers
Comparison of layout engines (CSS) – created article

[edit] Events

Hatfield rail crash – created article
List of rail accidents in the United Kingdom – created article

[edit] Locations

Hatfield – greatly expanded, categorised
Hatfield House – expanded content
West Bridgford – re-wrote article, categorised
Bayfordbury – created stub
Old Market Square – re‐written and cleaned up
Rongbuk Monastery — created stub

[edit] Space

Hot Jupiter – re‐wrote article from scratch
Extrasolar planet – corrected a lot of errors
Planetary migration – created stub
Rossiter-McLaughlin effect — created article
HD 189733 — created article
HARPS – created article
NGC 2403 – created article
Hodge 301 – created article
41450 Medkeff – created stub
SN 1604 – added table
SN 1987A – added table
SN 2004dj – created article
Geoffrey Marcy – created article
R. Paul Butler – created stub
Debra Fischer – created stub
Didier Queloz – created stub
Машиностроительный Завод им. Мясищева — created stub
Category:Astronauts – organised by nationality
Template:Minor planet – created template
Template:Supernova – created template
Template:Galaxy – created template
Template:Star – created template
Astronomical objects project member

[edit] Miscellaneous

Baby boomer – re-wrote article as non-US-centric. moved existing contents to Post-WW2 baby boom and Year 2000 baby boom
List of English words with diacritics — created stub
Nik og Jay – created stub
Kent's Cavern 4 — created article
Iceberg B-15 — created article
Lunar Government — created article
List of fonts in Mac OS X — created article
History of copper currency in Sweden — wrote entire article
Category:British archaeology – reorganised sites into subcategory

[edit] Images

All images created by me are licensed through a Creative Commons Attribution license of one form or another, some require Share Alike, some just attribution. My photographs have the additional condition that I be notified by email explaining when and where they are to be used. I retain copyright on these works, unless otherwise noted.
See english gallery (content in English) and commons gallery (language neutral content).

[edit] Photographs

[edit] Diagrams & Artwork

[edit] SVG Optimisations

The following were optimised by me in a text editor. I did not draw the originals.

Info icon (reduced to 1,315 bytes from 4,351 bytes; 70% reduction)
Padlock icon (reduced to 17,658 bytes from 27,265 bytes; 35% reduction)
Y Ddraig Goch (reduced to 122 KB from 245 KB; 50% reduction)
UK general election results, 2005 (uses classes instead of inline style attributes)
BBC Computer Literacy Project owl logo