User:Brighterorange

About

Hello, I am Tom. I just recently got my

.

Please use my talk page to communicate with me about Wikipedia rather than e-mail; I more likely to read your communique if it goes there, and definitely more likely to respond.

My real home page is at tom7.org.

Opinions

I love Wikipedia and have a number of opinions about how it could be improved.

Wish list

I found out that if I put a wish list of articles on my user page, sometimes they just appear out of nowhere!

• Nerd Stuff
  • Typed Assembly Language
    ) - machine languages that have type systems
  • Proof-Carrying Code
    ) - more generally, object code that comes with a proof of safety
  • AUTOMATH
    ) - Computer-checked mathematics history
  • de Bruijn index - probably the most common (internal) representation for languages with binders, like the lambda calculus
  • POPL, LICS
    , etc. - noted PL conferences
  • BLOSUM - similarity matrices used in genome comparison, like PAM
  • Join calculus and JoCaml
    - calculus and programming language for distributed computing
  • defunctionalization - compilation technique
  • closure (computer science)
    )
  • cut elimination for linear logic
  • Rick Statman
    ) is a lambda calculus legend.
• Rock Stuff
  • Scat Records - Record label that once was home to Guided by Voices and Nothing Painted Blue, etc.
  • canyon.mid
    - C:\WINDOWS\MEDIA
• Miscellaneous
  • Hamden High School - My high school; wp now has guidelines for inclusions of secondary schools
  • Mike Katz - Former Mr. Universe, star of Pumping Iron, and my high school health teacher
• Thomas Callister Hales - Pittsburgh mathematician who proved the Kepler conjecture
• Space Ghost: Coast to Coast
  (among other characters)
• Kleenexgirlwonder (Kleenex Girl Wonder) (Graham Smith (needs disamb)) - Recorded one of the best indie rock albums of all, "Ponyoak"
• ICFP programming contest (ICFP Programming Contest
  ) - long-running, free format programming competition

Here are some articles I'd like to extend.

• Algebraic data type needs work (!)
• Jitter could do a much better job of explaining the phenomenon. It currently reads as a list of disconnected bullet points
• American brewery
  that deserves more than a stub
• Rocketjumping
  needs cleanup since its merge
• Name binding is totally wrong in many ways
• Eli Whitney Museum is my alma mater, in a sense

Work on

• List of state leaders in 1385
  and all the related articles need auto en-dash fixing.
• List of colonial governors in 1904
  likewise.

Started

Here are some articles that I started.

• Mark Leyner - One of my favorite authors
• Sturmian word - Mathematical object of note
• Fibonacci word - Famous example of the latter
• Albright special - A bend (type of knot) used in angling
• Racking bend - Another bend
• logical framework
  implementation (plus metalogical tools) used for formalizing logics and programming languages. (I use it in my thesis research!) The article still needs to be fleshed out a bit.
• Merton
  in order to add more information and photos.
• Intertec Superbrain - An old twin-Z80 machine; Kermit was first developed to run on these
• Higher-order abstract syntax (HOAS) - another common way to represent binders if your meta language has binders, supported by Twelf
• Junkyard Wars
• Helen DeWitt - Another excellent author
• Furlough - vacation, especially from armed services or prison
• ICFP
  ) is a big programming languages conference
• Pulsar is an old arcade game
• Enteral formula
  is like total body nutrition in a tube
• Sierra On-Line
  adventure missing from Wikipedia!
• Guided By Voices
  's first box set of their first four albums
• King Missile the album by King Missile
• The Loss of Sexual Innocence is a movie I didn't see
• The Amy Fisher Story I didn't see either
• Stimpmeter - undeleted and rescued from copyvio hell a few times.
• Solenostemon scutellarioides
  is a crazy purple plant
• Adiantum peruvianum is an elegant green fern
• Guglielmo de Sanctis is some Italian painter
• LizaMoon is some dumb scareware virus that a lot of people fell for

Here is a project I started.

• Project Punctuation - Fix missing punctuation

Notes

• Special:Prefixindex/User:Brighterorange has all of my user page subpages.
• I believe this was my first edit on Wikipedia. Not bad for a noob, actually.
• This may be the most valuable diff ever.
• {{
  nofootnote
  }} is a useful template I can never remember the name of.
• I usually head to URLs directly by typing them out, but that doesn't work with Category:Articles that have been proposed for deletion but that may concern encyclopedic topics

PeriodBot

I've written some software in

if you want.

Useful links for database dumps:

• download.wikimedia.org
• Wikipedia:Database dump import problems
• Wikipedia:Database download

Since then I have been more interested in extending the Wikipedia interface using

(ugh) to automate repetitive editing tasks, particularly as respects my superficial editing interests (punctuation and typography, image formats). These are not quite ready for prime time yet, but please ask if you're interested in beta-testing.

I also frequently run my autopunctuation script on

)

Images

I like taking photographs, and I've uploaded some images to Wikipedia, too. I occasionally replace poor pictures with better high-resolution ones; when I do, my policy is to use a license at least as generous as the old one.

• 
  Doritaenopsis
• 
  Brugmansia
• 
  Brugmansia (detail)
• 
  Cogon grass
• 
  My friend Brendan wearing a bunch of climbing equipment
• 
  Heinz Field
• 
  Single hitch
• 
  Pile hitch
• 
  Sheet bend
• 
  Double sheet bend
• 
  Sheepshank
• 
  Surgeon's knot (tying)
• 
  Surgeon's knot
• 
  Highwayman's hitch
• 
  Albright special
• 
  Racking bend
• 
  Merton College library
• 
  Merton College

  front quad
• 
  Mob Quad
• 
  Old book bindings
• 
  British Typex machine
• 
  London Heathrow

  terminal 3
• 
  Intertec Superbrain
• 
  Inklings

  met
• 
  adjacent angles
• 
  Gopher rockfish of family

  Sebastidae
• 
  Jellyfish
• 
  Ira Glass
• 
  oak
• 
  caterpillar face
• 
  G. guira
• 
  Blue Jay
• 
  Inca tern
• 
  Rhinoceros Hornbill
• 
  Maple bug
• 
  Sam Davol of The Magnetic Fields
  (back before I had a good camera ;))
• 
  The Allegheny Observatory in Pittsburgh
• 
  South Side Slopes

  from Carson
• 
  Steep street in

  South Side Slopes
• 
  Map of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods
• 
  Ixora
• 
  Belamcanda chinensis
• 
  Solenostemon scutellarioides
• 
  Adiantum peruvianum
• 
  Locator maps for all of the Pittsburgh neighborhoods
• 
  Strip District
• 
  EWR Terminal A at night
• 
  Mist on Mt. Tuscarora in Allegany State Park
• 
  Canon D60

  , the camera I took most of these shots with
• 
  Harrison Hills Park outside Pittsburgh
• 
  Cotton gin at Eli Whitney Museum
• 
  Model trains at the Eli Whitney Museum
• 
  Timeworn workshop
• 
  Lots of paint
• 
  Allegheny Cemetery
• 
  Allegheny Cemetery
• 
  East End Brewing Company
• 
  Mount Oliver, Pennsylvania
• 
  Canon EOS 5D Mark II
• 
  Charlotte Marie de Gasville by Antoine Vestier
• 
  Henry IV as a Child by François Joseph Bosio
• 
  Mrs. Cleveland by Guglielmo de Sanctis
• 
  Dr. Washington Epps, My Doctor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema
• 
  Candlestick, Pipe, and Tobacco Box by John F. Peto
• 
  Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle by Jean-Baptiste Lemoyne
• 
  Man Eating in a Field by David Gilmour Blythe

As an image quality stickler, I also spend a lot of time tagging and converting images to better formats, especially SVG. Unfortunately SVG thumbnail support is pretty unreliable so some of these don't even show up. Does anybody know if I can do anything to make this situation better?

Zone plate	Absolute complement	Relative complement	Premature ventricular contraction
Brahmagupta's formula	atom	Tartrate crystals from Louis Pasteur's experiments	Example for Carathéodory's theorem

To do

• Mercury Villager (could take free image)
• Pi Day (some pictures from CMU tradition)
• sailor's hitch, other knots...
• Hamden High School
• Eli Whitney Museum (still need outside daytime shot)
• four-in-hand knot
• Taylor Allderdice High School
• Shadyside (Pittsburgh)
• Duquesne University
• Pilaf
• Farmington Canal
• St. Stanislaus Kostka Church (Pittsburgh) (church in Strip)
• Mensurstrich

Easily improved

• CD-R
• Spoon
• Merritt Parkway
• Cathedral of Learning
• Matzo
• lock picking

WP:IS a social networking site

• User:Mikemurphy is my brother who lives with me in Pittsburgh
• User:Agoode is a tall friend from school
• User:BD2412 was responsible for my successful nomination for adminship
• User:Alkivar nicely vandalized improved my user picture (see right) while voting was going on
• User:William Lovas is my officemate, cohort, and ex-one-and-a-half academic brother
• User:Cjoev is another one-and-a-half academic brother
• User:Jcreed gets lunch with me several times a week, during which time we solve all problems
• User:Sirmob is another fellow CMU PL student and Twelf party animal
• User:Nbeckman is my Elite Beat Buddy
• User:Kaustuv and I once scoured all of Oxford looking for an umbrella
• User:Grammarnerd is a Twister rival and mojito compatriot
• User:Greenerturtle is a blogventure original

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