User:Tamfang

Userboxes ≠ This user is unique, just like everyone else. @ This user can be reached by email. INTP This user's MBTI type is INTP. This user's favourite colour is green. en This user is a native speaker of English. fr-2 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français. ipa-2 ə This user has an intermediate understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet. eo-1 Ĉi tiu uzanto povas komuniki per baza nivelo de Esperanto it-1 Questo utente può contribuire con un livello semplice di italiano. la-1 Hic usor simplici latinitate contribuere potest. ... This user would like to be able to speak more languages. This user is interested in Heraldry blz-3 This user is a fluent speaker of blazon. This user is interested in polyhedra. C-2 This user is an intermediate C programmer. py-2 This user is an intermediate Python programmer. This user reads webcomics. This user maintains a blog. This user enjoys classical music. This user enjoys psychedelic rock. This user approves of approval voting. .  The This user puts two spaces after a period. This user enjoys singing. This user supports the legalization of all drugs for adults. This user opposes gun control. This user identifies as an Anarchist. 36px This user rejects all forms of Marxist thinking  ? This user would like to know where Guamania is. IQ This user's Intelligence Quotient is not useful information.

I'm just this bloke

I love Baroque and world fusion music; the sunlight of a late afternoon in spring; making pretty mathematical pictures, often using PoV-Ray.

I am afflicted (to varying degrees) with depression, insomnia, underemployment, and Rapture of the Future; allergic to perfumes, pollen, authority and good advice.

I was once fluent in Esperanto, French and Tourist Italian. I can also count to ten in Spanish, Latin, German, Russian, Sanskrit, Japanese; and can recite the alphabet in Greek and Hebrew.

I have received compliments on my voice, my habit of whistling (believe it or not) and a bit of a knack for pinning the tail on the fallacy.

I attended University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, but have not won a Nobel, Nebula, Pulitzer or Ig Nobel Prize. I did get a Knuth reward check, though (and mislaid it for five years).

I was, so they tell me who keep track of such things, the first Libertarian in California to be endorsed for partisan office (Assembly) by a major daily newspaper (the San Francisco Examiner before Hearst Corporation sold it). This happened during the newspaper strike of 1994.

the handle

Tamfang, in case you were wondering, is intended as Elvish for copper beard.

The first element is attested (so far as I know) only in a footnote to an early version of The Chaining of Melko; but the later canonical word for copper is less euphonious, so I choose to assume that some form of tambe survived east of the Misty Mountains.

tamfang also appears to be a word in Indonesian; I have no idea what it means.

subpages

User:Tamfang/blazons (in sporadic progress) is a collection of blazons of "good" coats of arms – consistent with my notions of heraldic style – found in Wikipedia, so that I can find them when I want an illustration of a given feature.

User:Tamfang/QC cast is a count of appearances of each character (above a threshold) in Questionable Content, started in response to a dispute about who are the major characters worth listing in the article.

User:Tamfang/Stuart is a list of legitimate descendants of King James VI&I who were alive at some point between the flight of James II (1688) and the death of Queen Anne (1714), in the normal order of succession. See Act of Settlement 1701 for context. I chose those dates as forming convenient boundaries to the succession crisis.

User:Tamfang/H3 preserves a conversation in Talk:Polychoron#H3 so that I can more readily find it again.

good writing

Anyone who aspires to write well could do worse than to read A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. You need not agree with all of its recommendations (I don't) but the core principles are sound:

• Preserve useful distinctions between words.
• Structure your sentences so that they resist misunderstanding.
• Resist the temptation to show off with fancy synonyms.

(Caveat: I have not looked at the Burchfield edition.)

the diacritics controversy

I'm a member of the vast majority of English-speakers who don't understand (for example) Czech; but I do know the difference between ‹c› and ‹č› and I want to know which it is so that I have a chance of pronouncing it more correctly. There presumably exist readers who can say the same of Vietnamese, and I want them to have the same benefit even if the diacritics are meaningless to me; I am not harmed by seeing the funny squiggles, now that Unicode fonts are generally available. If Wikipedia excluded everything that a substantial number of English-speakers don't understand, I wouldn't bother with it.

pet peeves

This list is incomplete, but you needn't bother adding to it.

• the fact that — A sentence containing this phrase can nearly always be made shorter and better.
• refer to and describe are not synonyms. To refer to X as Z is to use Z as a substitute reference for X; this may implicitly describe X as Z, but the relation is not symmetric. The sentence "That movie with Rick and Ilsa is the best movie ever" refers to Casablanca as "that movie with Rick and Ilsa" and describes it as "the best movie ever".
• comprise and compose are (approximately) reciprocal, not synonyms. New York City is composed of five boroughs; New York City comprises five boroughs.
• seven-year anniversary — The correct phrase is seventh anniversary. An anniversary is when the year (anno) completes a turn (versu). It follows that there cannot be a six-month anniversary; call it a sixth mensiversary (or first semi-anniversary) if you don't mind being suspected of cleverness.
• false precision — Don't write $176 billion as $176,000,000,000.00; even if each of those zeroes is accurate (which is unlikely), it does the reader no good to have to count them.
  • Percentage notation is generally not justified if you're talking about fewer than 100 of something. If you say fifty percent when you mean half, you're making the audience work harder than necessary.
• triangular-shaped — Is there any other way to be triangular?
• The X is just that: a X. Thank you for reminding us what that means; we might have forgotten it in the long march from the beginning of the sentence.
• book attribution — This is a matter of style.

In “Only the Paranoid Survive”, Dr Grove’s bestselling book, he argues ....

This could sometimes mean that someone else argues, in a book edited by Grove. Where someone is mentioned by name and by a pronoun, the explicit name ought to be in the most prominent position, namely (if possible) the subject of the sentence. I'd make it:

In his bestselling book "Only the Paranoid Survive", Dr Grove argues ....

• A framistan is a term that refers to ... — Too many articles begin like that! A name refers to a thing, but a thing is not its name and does not refer to itself; it is itself.
• Some of the notable examples include ... — What does that mean exactly? Of those notable examples that include the items listed, does each one include them? And do some other notable examples also include them? Either drop some of or change include to are.
• A suspect is a known person who is suspected of an act. The word should not be used for the unknown person who definitely did the act.
• contemporary means of the same time; to use it as a synonym for modern or recent risks ambiguity.
• A crucifix is something (e.g. an enemy of the state) affixed to a cross, not the cross itself; thus an unoccupied cross is not a crucifix, no matter how ornate.
• A tragedy, in classical theatre, is a play in which a hero is brought down by his own flaws. I don't insist on such a narrow definition, but let's confine the words tragedy and tragic to consequences of human error. Other words like sorrow and misfortune and disaster are available for premeditated murder and act of god.
• late 1960s and early 1970s — Why not around 1970 ?

I made these

made with Python

See my page on Commons.

made with Povray

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made with Jenn

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gongs

for assuming good faith. ([1]) —D-Rock (talk) 06:08, 15 June 2006 (UTC)

		The Goat Star
		For contributions to Caprinae Solidarius Lance Corporal William Windsor salutes you!  Chzz  ►  22:09, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

		The Mullet Pierced
		Truly miscellanous, contributions to lots of pages, helping others with this regard, doing leg work. (About time.)- Jarry1250 [ humourous – discuss ] 10:20, 4 July 2009 (UTC)