User:Cyan

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Please leave comments on my talk page, rather than this page.

I have preserved the content of an article from the 1911 Encyclopedia on Aerotherapeutics.

I have kidnapped some articles created by a hard-banned user.

Who am I? Can I conceal myself forevermore?[edit]

I was an admin at one time, but resigned because I'm no longer current on the conventions, duties and tools. I drop in occasionally to do some minor edits, just to keep a hand in.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity[edit]

Major contributions[edit]

Principle of maximum entropy
Base pair
Principle of indifference
Borel's paradox

Minor contributions[edit]

Eclectic probability
Quotient rule
Harmonic series (mathematics)
George Polya
Reasonable person
Ion source
Electron ionization
Omer
Schlock Mercenary
Pierre-Simon Laplace

Extremely minor contributions (TeXification and the like)[edit]

Derivation of the partition function
Lagrange multipliers
Hempel's paradox
Adoption
Barney & Friends
This Might Be A Wiki
Carolus Linnaeus
Green Light Wiki
Inviscid 

Here is my to-do list and articles in progress. Comments appreciated.

And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character[edit]

A most extraordinary limit theorem[edit]

Insults[edit]

When comments are posted, the raw text appears without vocal inflections or body language; the lack of these nonverbal cues tends to make the raw text appear to be more terse or rude than the sender actually intended. This is stating the obvious, but people seem to forget it in the heat of the moment, causing a vicious cycle. I think it is rather sad that one doesn't have to look far to find one user insulting another. (I have been guilty of this myself -- sometimes I just can't hold back.)

The wikipedia policy link on this topic is wikipedia:staying cool when the editing gets hot.

Shopworn tactics[edit]

I have observed that during conflicts it is quite common for one party, or more often both, to wrap themselves in the "Wikipedia flag", as if a personal attack on one user were somehow an attack on the entire community. A related maneuver is to declare that the future of Wikipedia is at stake. These "escalation tactics" are rather tired ploys. Insulting another user is... poor, but it isn't an general attack; only wholesale vandalism qualifies. And the project's future, in the broadest sense, isn't decided during the slinging of insults; it's decided on the policy pages.

What a lousy webpage![edit]

Judging by what I've read on this page, the only way my user page could be worse is if I used some marketese. So let this be a lesson to you all: don't be a smart ass like me.

Serendipity[edit]

I was fixing a broken link on the heuristic page when I noted a link to a wiki on the subject. That wiki, it turns out, is one of a set of wikis hosted by a fellow named Ben Kovitz. I noted that his wikis weren't listing in the Wiki article, so I made them an entry, under Green Light Wiki.

A little later on, I was reading a Talk page, and I noted the common misspelling "Wikipeida". I thought that it might be a good idea to create a redirect page for this typo, so I did a search to see if it had already been created. It hadn't been, but the search did pull up History of Wikipeida. When I clicked on it, who should I find but this same fellow, Ben Kovitz!

Neat!

Of course, that's nothing compared to all the coincidences that didn't happen...

I can't believe I ate the whole thing![edit]

Atlas Shrugged Redirects deleted by yours truly. It took an hour and a half.

Now I'm a Wiki-Hero -- women want me, and men want to be me.

The Chain[edit]

And if you don't love me now
You would never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain

- Fleetwood Mac

Sock Puppets[edit]

User:Puce, User:Fuchsia, User:Magenta, and User:Chartreuse are sock puppet accounts I created to play a joke on the page User:Liberal/deny freedom of speech.

A word to the wise[edit]

“Common language - or, at least, the English language - has an almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them in a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement.” - E. T. Jaynes

The sign[edit]


I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes
I saw the sign
Life is demanding without understanding
I saw the sign and it opened up my eyes
I saw the sign

- Ace of Base