User:Intangir

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22, male, math/cs undergrad at UAB in Birmingham, AL, USA, North America, Earth, Sol System, Milky Way Galaxy, Prime Material Plane, Multiverse, your mom =)

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My favorite Slashdot comments about Wikipedia: [1] [2]

Contents 1 My hopeless endeavors 2 Declaration of bias 3 Notable additions 4 Todo list 5 Random musings and hard questions for which I don't have good answers

[edit] My hopeless endeavors

• Finish my attempt to elegantly prove the four color theorem I succeeded in finding an equivalent statement. Too bad its just as hard to prove. :)
• Find where speculative theory begins and experimental evidence ends. Science is resistant but not immune to dogma.

[edit] Declaration of bias

I am broadly agnostic and skeptical. This means that I have(in order of uncertainty):

• Skepticism of dogma- I am a scientific skeptic. Pseudoscience is without merit.
• Skepticism of unobservables- I am a firm scientific antirealist. Specifically, I am the kind that reads unobservable entities in theory to be mere conceptual metaphors.
• Skepticism of god- I don't know whether or not a god exists.
• Skepticism of myself- In general, I am rarely confident in my opinions.
• Skepticism of experts- I support fringe science. Its primary divergence is a lack of expert support. While it is good to generally trust experts more than neophytes or cranks, even an entire field of experts can be wrong.

[edit] Notable additions

Pages Authored

• Dev-C++ : My favorite Integrated Development Environment
• Kuroda normal form : CNF is to CFG as KNF is to CSG
• Audiation : A neologism for 'thinking in music'.
• Rate theory : Theory that pitch is signaled in the neuron's firing rate.
• Gravitational interaction of antimatter : I favor antimatter repulsion.

Images Authored

• Image:Bismuth_Crystal.jpg

Destubbings

• World Community Grid : I also started a Wikipedia team for it.

Wikifications

• Place theory : Theory that pitch is signaled by the location of firing neurons.

[edit] Todo list

• Toki pona needs a plain language distillation of my esoterically EBNF grammar for it.
• Tree automata needs expansion.
• Stückelberg-Feynman interpretation deserves its own article.
• Gravitational interaction of antimatter needs a miracle.
• Exotic matter talks exclusively about negative mass.
• Negative energy needs an article.
• Antiphotons need an article.
• Talk:Drake equation, someone needs to respond to my question.
• Propose a fringe science wikiproject, or propose a mandate expansion of the pseudoscience wikiproject.

[edit] Random musings and hard questions for which I don't have good answers

• What are the advantages/disadvantages of Average absolute deviation vs. Standard deviation?
• What are all the theoretical assumptions which are as yet unverified by experiment?
• How can the practice of science be rational at the blurred line between theory and experiment?
• The first theories of Quantum Mechanics started with the uncertainty principle which predicts vacuum fluctuations. Stochastic Electrodynamics starts with vacuum fluctuations and predicts an uncertainty principle. Feynman's Quantum Electrodynamics starts with virtual particles and predicts both. In essence, Virtual particles -> vacuum fluctuations <-> uncertainty principle.
• Light (theoretically) travels faster in between casimir plates because there is 'less vacuum' there. This seems very similar to how light slows down in a dense medium. In such a case, light is said to "gain an effective mass". Perhaps then, photons could be said to have an effective mass in a normal vacuum which is lowered when traveling between casimir plates. Even if providing no new predictive insight, such a theory, if effective, would be ontologically cute. I need to research this.
• How does particle exchange explain attractive forces? The common uncertainty principle explanation seems dubious.
• Normal deterministic causality assumes that a past state predicts a future state. What is it called when a past state and a future state predict a state inbetween?
• If Wikipedia is inhabited by netizens and 99% of all internet traffic is pornography, why aren't 99% of articles porn related? Perhaps after arriving here by mistake looking for Bomis Babes, Wikipedians universally hit upon the idea to write about unexcitingly non-sexual things in an effort to "think about baseball"?