User:Lou Sander

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search

Contents

[edit] About Me

This editor is a Veteran Editor and is entitled to display this Iron Editor Star.
Lou Sander

I'm retired from a career in several medically-related high-tech industries. Along the way, I worked for Microsoft and for the pioneering computer hardware company DEC. In retirement I have taught logic, critical thinking, management, marketing, mathematics, and practical computer subjects at the college level. I have also taught Wikipedia 101, a short course for beginners in using and editing Wikipedia. Other than that, I do pretty much as I please, subject to financial limitations.

My major activities include serving as the driving force in The USS Rankin Association and The Alliance of Military Reunions.

One of my basic Wikipedia activities is posting new articles, on subjects I either know about or can quickly research; I've posted well over a hundred of them. Another is reworking weak articles that I happen to encounter and take an interest in. I also add information where it's needed and where I can help, and I fix errors wherever I encounter them. I used to watch a handful of controversial articles, mostly to help make them better, but also to see how well/poorly the editors deal with them. It wasn't pretty, so I stopped.

I've posted many new articles about U.S. Navy ships. Ship articles are fairly easy to create, even if you've never seen a rowboat, and doing them is a good way to build your article total. If you'd like to do some ship articles yourself, I'll be glad to show you how. There are hundreds of ships still to be posted, and the basic information for their articles is readily available online. Once you've done a ship or two, you can do an article like USS Ottawa in less than an hour. It's pretty rewarding, but you know that if you've already posted new articles (it's also kind of cool to watch other people improve your articles). If you want to know more, send email.

My LinkedIn profile is HERE, and my personal web site is HERE. I tweet at USSRankin and AllMilReunions.

WARNING: The paragraphs below plainly state the qualifications and accomplishments of an experienced person with many interests. If you consider such material immodest, you shouldn't read further. In any event, remember: If it's true, it isn't bragging.

[edit] I think I'm a pretty good editor because...

  • I've done a lot of reading, especially in encyclopedias. I've been reading since I was three years old; when I was in second grade, the teacher told my parents I was reading at a seventh grade level. I've been reading encyclopedias since those ancient times, and reading them extensively since the 1970's. I've spent countless hours reading the World Book and various editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. I own a copy of the 1911 Eleventh Edition, and have spent many hours perusing it. IMHO, the guys who wrote it really knew how to write an encyclopedia. Very little of what they wrote was later shown to be wrong.
  • I've learned at the feet of high masters. I got straight A's in high school (back when that was harder to do), and I earned degrees in rigorous subjects from Duke University (electrical engineering, with advanced placement in freshman English) and the University of Chicago (MBA/economics). I was far from earning straight A's at either place, but I got my share of them, plus a few D's, in a time when A's were much harder to get, and D's much easier. More recently, I've spent quality learning time at the feet of Tony Robbins, Robert Kiyosaki, and Thomas L. Saaty.
  • Many have seen fit to publish my writings. That includes about 500 articles, columns, programs and reviews for dozens of publications, from local newspapers to computer magazines with worldwide circulation. During my "computer period" in the 1980's, I was a prolific and well-known writer on Commodore subjects. I wrote dozens of articles, two books (one of them translated into Italian) and several very popular columns, most notably the Magic column in RUN magazine. (You can see the names and full text of some of the computer articles HERE). My work was reprinted in six other books that I know of. Though my computer writing spanned all the computers of the day, it stopped when Commodore faded from the scene. Since then, most of my writing has been for newsletters, web sites, corporate research reports, etc., though I occasionally do an article for a magazine. When writing for publication, I'm usually known as Louis F. Sander. In the not-formally-published-by-others category, I've written or compiled almost 300 online obituaries, about a hundred poems, and over 125 new articles in Wikipedia. I'm the creator and proprietor of two large web sites, for The USS Rankin Association HERE and a pre-Facebook personal site HERE. Recently I've started another one HERE. I also publish an eight-page, 1,300-copy quarterly newsletter for my Navy ship reunion group. We think it's one of the very best newsletters of its type. You can see it, including back copies, HERE. Nice, huh?
  • I've done a lot of editing in Wikipedia. My first edit was in July, 2003. As of 4/21/11, I've made 7,700 edits in all. Time flies.
  • Et cetera. I spent twelve years as chairman of the board of a regionally important public library. In connection with that work, I spent thousands of hours in dozens of different libraries, where I learned a lot about information and how it's created, processed, and disseminated. Also, as stated up above, I have taught logic and critical thinking.

The bottom line is that I've spent over 70 years absorbing knowledge and cultivating the art of being right. The most important part of that art is that when you aren't right, you admit it and learn from your mistake. Whatever my abilities in the less important areas of the art, I claim absolute mastery of that one.

I think I'm a pretty good editor, Q.E.D..

[edit] You might also like to know (but probably not)...

USNavyOfficerCrest.png
  • In my brief Navy career, I holystoned teak decks, climbed to the top of masts, stood watches in engine rooms and CICs and on quarterdecks and bridges. (I also learned to swear like a sailor, and from time to time I exercise that skill.) I conned several ships, made fixes by celestial navigation, and landed on beaches in ramped boats and an LVT. In addition to the LVT, I boarded and departed ships by brow, accommodation ladder, cargo net, davit, boat boom, cargo boom, highline, and helo. I encrypted and decrypted messages, ate on mess decks and in wardrooms, and did most of the things that seafaring people do. I also had a Final Top Secret security clearance. At one time I considered myself pretty salty for a fellow my age, and I think I really was. Forty years later, I assembled a pretty good glossary of Naval Terminology. You can see it and download it HERE.
1922 world map.png
  • My own published writing has been read in dozens of countries large and small (e.g., Australia and Papua New Guinea), and one of my books was translated into Italian. I was heard on local radio before I was in high school. For several years I was a featured personality on AOL's predecessor Quantum Link. (I was online there on its first day of operation.) I've twice had 15 minutes of fame on local TV. The first was coverage of my Computer Kindergarten classes in the early 1980s. The second was in my role as an expert on pornography in public libraries (I'm against it). A major TV station sent a crew to my home to interview me as I called up naughty bits on my laptop. Fun, that.
  • My first real job in industry (1965) was with Motorola, where one of the big guys in engineering was Marty Cooper, who later invented the cell phone. I was a minor person in the marketing department, but I carried a pager and used a Xerox 914 copy machine. Motorola was a pretty progressive company.
MRI head side.jpg
  • My personal medical experiences include surgery for an inguinal hernia and hydrocele when I was seven years old, repair of a double hernia when I was in my fifties, and repair of a very large rotator cuff tear in 2003. The hernia surgeries weren't painful or disruptive, but the rotator cuff was a different matter. There's a lot of pain with that surgery, and recovery involves six weeks of immobilization of the shoulder, followed by lengthy physical therapy, also painful in the early days. If you don't do the physical therapy, your shoulder might not recover fully or at all. I did mine religiously, and my recovery was 100%. If you ever have rotator cuff surgery, please follow through with the therapy (a lot of people let it slide). I'm also subject to seasonal affective disorder. It hit me pretty hard in the mid-1990s, but these days it's mostly a nuisance that makes life less satisfying in the winter.
  • I had other interesting experiences, too. One time I was working on a large sale to a hospital in Ohio. They had committed to buy my product, so I took my sales manager with me for the final contract signing for the biggest sale in my life. When we got there, the customer told us he had changed his mind and was going with a competitor. Heartbreak hotel, and what an embarrassment! One week later, their town was leveled by a tornado. Once again, don't (expletive deleted) with me. ;-)
  • When I worked for Digital Equipment Corporation in the early 1970s, I sold 8KB of 8-bit computer memory for $10,000. At those prices today, a 4GB flash drive would cost $5.2 billion. Do the math.
  • I was at Digital when I sold the previously mentioned laboratory information systems. Today, such things are in just about every lab in the industrialized world, but back then, they were new and mysterious articles. At one time, I had sold more of them than any other person in the world: two.
  • The first car I remember riding in was my father's 1941 Chevrolet. The first one I owned was a 1953 Chevrolet. Since then, I've owned a lot of them, notably a white Firebird convertible, two other Firebirds, and a Grand Prix that a female British radiologist called "the most beautiful motorcar I've ever seen." Most of the others have been GM or foreign. I buy them new or used, and I sell them when they no longer pass State Inspection. You save a lot of money that way. Currently I have an age-appropriate blue Buick Lesabre and a red Mazda Protegé 5 Zoom-Zoom.
Meteor.jpg
  • For a guy who's never been employed as an IT professional, I know a lot about computers and computing. I used a slide rule in college, and one of the Ph.D. students there worked in a room that contained some sort of electronic computer. I don't think I ever went inside it. After college, I served on Navy ships that used mechanical analog computers for fire control. My first exposure to digital computers was as an MBA student in 1965, when I wrote programs in FORTRAN. We wrote our programs on paper, then used a keypunch machine to put them onto punched cards. We'd put the cards into a mail tray, and a few days later a printout of our programs and their output would be returned to us. In 1967, I managed a small punched card accounting department. I was good at running the department and specifying new reports, but I never learned to wire the boards. In 1971 I began working in computer sales. I sold many systems, from standalone minicomputer systems to specialized timesharing applications running on mainframes. I always liked what these systems did, but as a sales rep, I never really got into programming them.
Commodore PET2001.jpg
  • I bought my first computer, a Commodore PET, in 1979. Since then, I've spent over 30,000 hours at the keyboard. I've owned at least twenty different computers, and my laser printer is bigger and faster than yours. So, probably, are my two 13x19 inch inkjets. I am (or at least have been) an exceptionally creative amateur programmer, mostly in various forms of BASIC. In the 1980s, I was a prolific and well-known writer for the computer magazines of the day, mostly covering Commodore computers. My Magic column was the main feature of RUN magazine, which in 1985 was the second fastest-growing U.S. magazine of any kind. My pioneering Computer Kindergarten course was popular in the early 1980s, and since then I've taught many computer courses at the college level, mostly emphasizing application software and computer literacy. Today I'm mostly just a user, but I sometimes dabble in macros, VBA, and similar areas. In late 2010 I acquired an iPad, which I've come to regard as a modern-day miracle. The Apple store training staff is something a little bit less than that, having pronounced it as "awesome" when I learned how to cut, copy, and paste on the iPad. Sheesh!
  • My father was a Boy Scout. I was a Cub Scout, a Boy Scout, and an Explorer Scout. One of my sons was a Webelos, and the other was a member, with me, of Indian Guides. All of us, to some extent, incorporated the values taught by those organizations. A Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. Us, too.
  • I can pin down some other influences in my early life. As a schoolboy I remember being taken to a handful of circuses, prize fights, and minstrel shows. I spent a lot of time in Sunday school, all of it either with Presbyterians or Methodists. To this day, I don't understand the differences between the two of them. My father was president and later a Life Member of the Berkeley Hills Fire Department; they held monthly raffles to raise money, and as a kid I sold a LOT of tickets. Though I never joined any Masonic organizations, my family was heavily involved in them. My father was Master of his lodge, and I'm pretty sure that both my grandfathers were Masons. My mother and her mother were heavily involved in the Order of the Eastern Star and the Order of the Amaranth. After I left home, my father became a Shriner and was active in the Rotary Club. I attended my father's Masonic funeral; it was the first one I had ever seen.
  • I fly the American flag, 24 hours a day, and illuminated at night, but I'm not some kind of a nut about it. As a teacher, I practice the soft bigotry of low expectations. My students definitely appreciate it.
Heinz Field, Pittsburgh
  • I went to my twenty-fifth high school class reunion, and now I've gone to my fiftieth. Go Indians!  Classmates remembered me as very smart and very funny, especially the latter. I told 'em if they wanted to know what I'd done since high school, they could see a lot of it right here. You should go to your own reunions—you'll find treasures there that you don't even know you have. You can even fall in love there. Believe it.
  • In 2011 I went to my fiftieth college reunion at Duke University. The place has changed a LOT. I saw one of my freshman roommates and probably my best friend at Duke. I hadn't seen them for fifty and twenty-five years, respectively; all of us remembered each other fondly. The highlight of the event was lunch on Saturday, where Mike Krzyzewski, addressed the class. During his remarks, this extremely successful man gave us advice on how we could duplicate his success in life. The best of it, repeated four or five times during his presentation, was "Don't talk while the guest speaker is speaking."
  • Also in 2011 I went to my first-ever gathering of Wikipedia contributors, a Wiknic. It was the first time I had ever met any other editors (except for a few that I have taught how to edit). They were interesting people, and not nearly as strange as I had expected. (Being a bit strange myself, I KNOW about strange.)
  • I am a faithful husband, and I am safe around women and girls, even if they are stunningly attractive. That having been said, there is room in my heart, including at its very center, for hundreds and hundreds of people, including, possibly, you. I love little children, and I can make any baby or toddler smile. I hug my grandchildren (ages 11, 8, and 6) at every opportunity, and if their mothers allow it, I also hug their little friends (one of them has adopted me as her grandfather). I tell my students I love them like my nieces and nephews; they believe it because I mean it. I'm pretty much fond of people from cultures other than my own; I generally like the Jews, Arabs and Parsis I've met, and considering my age and ethnicity, I'm pretty good friends with a remarkable number of Negroes. (Six of the latter are my informally adopted sons or daughters.) I have a rap that dozens of blacks have applauded, and I can speak in black dialect in a way that only offends dull-witted white folk. I eat, and like, collard greens and black-eyed peas; they are best if cooked with fatback and followed with sweet potato pie.
  • When I was in college, some friends and I hitchhiked to some hick town to watch a KKK rally that had gotten some notorious publicity. The Klan was upset about something that the Lumbees were doing. The rally never materialized, but we did see a car full of people wearing white hoods. Otherwise, the place was crawling with cops. All in all, it was an excellent adventure.
  • I am a reasonably sophisticated amateur psychologist, especially with regard to the work and ideas of Carl Jung. I have expert knowledge of his theory of psychological types, including its popular manifestation in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I'm ENTP, the rational Inventor. They do things like making this crazy user page and living the life it depicts. (Jung said that people see ENTPs as "amoral adventurers." He was right. They are wrong about the "amoral," and right about the "adventurers.")
  • I've met and talked with some notable people, including Bill Gates, Steve Case, George Shultz, and Nobel laureates Herbert Simon and Godfrey Hounsfield. (Of all those big-time guys, only Steve Case might remember me.) I never met Timothy McVeigh, but I edited his writing and got it published for him. It was his very first national exposure. I hope I wasn't responsible for lighting his passion for fame, but if I was, so be it. (I'm pretty sure he had big-time help with the bombing, and I'm absolutely sure he'd remember me, if he were still among the living.)
P culture.svg
  • When I was younger, I played chess, Scrabble, acey-deucey, hearts, pinochle, and even Canasta. I was very good at Scrabble, and OK at the rest of them. In the early 1990s, my friend Laura Hopper and I were co-winners of one of Games Magazine's most difficult contests ever; we deserved it. Today, I play very few games. I do consistently win 60-65% of my medium difficulty tries at spider solitaire, though (my best run is 40 wins out of 50 games, or 80%). I also play the lottery, especially when the prizes are large. Some might mistakenly see me as a high roller, since I've often bought over $1,000 worth of Powerball tickets at one fell swoop. (Actually, it's for a 100+ player lottery pool that I run. We win money at every drawing, but we haven't won the big one yet.)
  • When I was a little kid in the early 1940s, I owned a 78 rpm record player with an electric motor and mechanical sound reproduction. They don't make 'em like that any more. Records were scarce in those days, and I think I owned two of them. One was Schubert's Marche Militaire. Later on, I owned Peter Lind Hayes's Genie the Magic Record it was released in 1946, so I must have had it in first or second grade. When I heard the record again in 2010, I remembered every word from the singing introduction.
  • Like The Daily Show and Rush Limbaugh, I know how to mix humor with truth, and I can pack lots of both into one paragraph. All facts but one in this and the prior paragraphs are absolutely, and usually verifiably, true. (The humor's in there, too, but it's also in the eye of the beholder. Some of it is also in the links.)
A view of the garden
Looking out from the forest

If you care to know more, just Google my name and you'll find it. I'm not the famous baby doctor, and I'm definitely not the orchid or the tragically murdered cop.

[edit] What I ignore

NOTE TO READERS: Please don't take this material in a negative way—it is intended to be helpful.

Life has taught me to suffer fools, but not to suffer them gladly or for a protracted period of time. It has also taught me about their relatives the assholes and the pissants. Wikipedia has taught me about their other relatives, the dicks.

When Wikipedia material seems to be coming from one of the four, I give it the benefit of the doubt. Then I give it a second chance, and usually a third. After that, I just ignore it. And in spite of constant temptations, I try hard not to give voice lessons. (Robert A. Heinlein was right—you spend your time and energy, and they just snout their keyboards and grunt.)

Wiki-life has taught me that editors whose words I end up ignoring have certain characteristic behaviors:

  • They have the attitude that because THEY think it, or believe it, or feel strongly about it, it must be right, regardless of the absence of any justification, and frequently in the presence of contrary evidence.
  • They use the words "clearly" and "obviously" a lot, especially about things that aren't clear or obvious.
  • They repeat their arguments, often with an indication that another editor doesn't understand them. "You obviously miss the point of what I said up above. Here, I will say it again for you." And again, and again, and again.
  • They suggest that other editors review some sort of Wikipedia policy or guideline. "I suggest you read WP:RS," for example.
  • When they assert "NPOV!," or "Undue Weight!", they can't or won't explain the grounds on which they are asserting it.
  • They conjure up reasons why reliable sources that they disagree with are really not reliable.
  • They sometimes claim academic credentials that their edits don't reflect—they write and think at the level of much less-educated people, and they aren't as smooth as Essjay.


FoolVogtherr.jpg
"The way of a fool is right in his own eyes." – Proverbs 12:15


[edit] Articles started

I like to do articles that relate to my short career as a Naval officer, which was spent aboard USS Rankin and as a Beach Jumper. That has led to doing an article for every Navy ship built where the Rankin was. (Other people did one or two of them, but I did the rest.) Recently I created or significantly edited articles for all the Navy's 117 attack cargo ships. This wasn't as hard as it might seem, since the basic facts are available at DANFS. But there was a lot of copy editing, heavy-duty Wikification, fact checking and research. I've also created or meddled with other articles that interest me, or were red links somewhere, etc., and of course I expand, fix errors, etc. in articles that I come across that need it.

Click here to see the 100+ U.S. Navy ship articles I've started

Here are some of the others, mostly unconnected to the Navy:

5"/38 caliber gun
Abigail Thernstrom
Allegheny Regional Asset District
American Association for Thoracic Surgery
American Bus Association
American Roentgen Ray Society
Ammunition ship
Andromeda class attack cargo ship
Arcturus class attack cargo ship
Artemis class attack cargo ship
Atoy Wilson
Average and over
Battle Efficiency Award
Beach Jumpers
Bere (grain)
Center for Individual Rights
Combat loading
Crown Publishing Group
Cruise book
Davisville, Rhode Island
Easter parade
Electronics for Medicine
Giant Raccoon's Flatulence theory (deleted, alas)
Goldfish Club
Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania
Infinity walk
International Society for Horticultural Science
International Symposium on the Analytic Hierarchy Process
James E. Schrager
Jane Kirby
Jeremy A. Rabkin
Lee Pockriss
Libertarian Party of Connecticut
Marjorie Sterrett Battleship Fund Award
Moore Dry Dock Company
Municipal Authority
National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives

National Sheriffs' Association
Naval Supply Depot, Oakland
North Carolina Shipbuilding Company
Orkney College
Oro Bay (a bay in New Guinea)
Onslow Beach
Pasco Bowman II
Pennsylvania Library Association
Peter A. Tyrrell
Peter N. Kirsanow
Pissant
Pitkeathly Wells
Police Executive Research Forum
Protected group
Quarter Century Wireless Association
Quarterdeck
Simpleton (folklore)
Sodium aluminum phosphate
Sparrows Point
Tampa Shipbuilding Company
The International College of Surgeons
Teluk Yos Sudarso (another bay in New Guinea)
Tolland class amphibious cargo ship
Type C2 ship
Type C3 ship
U.S. Soccer Foundation
United States Federal Maritime Board
United States Navy Regulations
Viewtron
WQED Multimedia
Walsh-Kaiser Co., Inc.
Water Tupelo
Yerba Mate Association of the Americas
Yos Sudarso

[edit] Other Articles of Interest

I've made extensive and/or important contributions to:

[edit] Article hit counter

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Lou_Sander&oldid=459188136"
Personal tools
Namespaces

Variants
Actions
Navigation
Interaction
Toolbox
Print/export