User:Omegatron

Gnomes are stealing articles from my watchlist [1]. If you respond to me on a discussion page there is a chance I won't see it, since they ate that particular article and it is not on my watchlist anymore. So if I don't respond, put a note on my talk page.

Contents

1 Table namespace

2 About this Wikipedian

2.1 Things
2.2 My POV
2.3 Memory holes
2.4 Machines are meant to do work
2.5 i.e., e.g., etc.

3 To do (or not to do)

4 Articles I am basically done contributing to

5 Electronics diagrams

5.1 Modified version of Klunky
5.2 Modular electronics schematics

6 Forced PNG rendering

7 Spell checker

8 Subpages and links

Table namespace

I think tables should have their own namespace and editor. See discussion and comment here: Wikipedia:Proposal for intuitive table editor and namespace.

About this Wikipedian

I am an electronics/signal processing engineer working in the field of pro audio equipment. I love Wikipedia. A little too much.

I am also working on the Electronics wikibook, if slowly.

I claim to value my anonymity, but I'm not actually that careful about it.

Things

Various things I enjoy: Electronic art music, Linux, Scrabble, Quesadillas, Cybernetics, Ursula LeGuin: The Dispossessed, Vernor Vinge: The Peace War/Marooned in Realtime/A Fire Upon the Deep, Stranger in a Strange Land, Ender's Game, Achewood, JACK, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Bal-Sagoth, Transhumanism, Technological singularity, Video art, Cave In, Electronics, Glitch (music), The Moon and Sixpence, Memetics, Yo La Tengo, Buffalo '66, Bjork, Radiohead, Lost in Translation, Project Gutenberg, My Bloody Valentine, Múm, Panspermia, Fruit juice, Mozilla Firefox, Electric violin, Grindcore, Pure data, The Little Prince, Metric system, Libraries, Squarepusher, Computer music, Shostakovich, Amélie

My POV

empiricism, scientific skepticism, atheist (ex-Christian), evolutionist (ex-creationist), generally liberal, but not affiliated with anyone's ideology.

Memory holes

I dislike it when people delete pseudoscientific articles, burn books, censor opinion, or otherwise destroy information. If an idea has a hold in people's minds, the only way to fight it is to address it and show why it is wrong, not delete it as nonsense. My first response when I see something crackpottish: check Wikipedia for an unbiased, scientific account. "Censoring" information is exactly what makes crackpot stuff take off. "Go to our website to find out what They don't want you to know!!!" Providing a good source of unbiased non-crackpot info is the only way to keep it under control. If you need to commit "memocide" to get people to believe what you believe, your beliefs are probably wrong. Don't delete; fix.

I guess this makes me an Inclusionist . See also Wikipedia:Replies to common objections#Cranks

Machines are meant to do work

I am generally in favor of adapting machines to humans. In a few cases it's better to adapt humans to machines, but that's just because the computer programming required, for instance, would be more work than the extra work required for each user to adapt to the machine. In most cases, when there is a conflict between convenience for humans and convenience for software, the software should be changed.

i.e., e.g., etc.

I read an article somewhere that convinced me that most Latin or foreign phrases really have no use in English, and just alienate certain classes of people, and I have been casually changing them into English equivalents when I run across them. I wish I could find the article...

Don't defend your beliefs. Test them.

To do (or not to do)

Upload my electrical images to the commons
- Waiting til an automated tool is made?

Water analogy to electric circuits ?
- come up with a better name first
- See User:Omegatron/water analogy for progress thus far

Audio timescale-pitch modification
- Add more detailed info

Transmission gate

RC circuit
RLC circuit
Electronic filter - This needs a list of butterworth, chebyshev, etc. and diagrams?
- Butterworth filter
- Chebyshev filter
- Bessel filter
- Elliptic filter

Resonance

signal processing versions of
- tie these three all together. don't forget circular versions and Fourier transform methods.

You know what would be awesome?

The screen shows
- a balloon, cross-sectioned. The area around it is white, to show atmospheric pressure. The area inside the oval-shaped skin is darker gray, to indicate higher pressure.
- Underneath this graphic is a ...

No wait.

Ok underneath the graphic was going to be a dot display, like this:

(i should just tell that guy about my idea and he could probably do it. i wonder if he would want to contribute to the wikipedia...)

then beneath that was going to be a pressure function displayed like a graph (initially a rectanlge function), but now that i think of it, the balloon display could just have the particles all in one, instead of the colors. yeah, the colors could just be a side-effect of the particles. that makes more sense and will help understanding better. so just the balloon animation with particles moving around and bouncing off each other, denser inside the balloon. then you show the pressure function of a line going through the center of the balloon. since right now the balloon skin is there, the pressure is just a rectangle function.

then the balloon is popped. you watch in super slow motion as the circle of higher-pressure air in the center equalizes with the atmospheric-pressure air around it. the pressure function shows the wave as the higher pressure equals out and overshoots and equals out again, creating a sort of damped sinish wave (what i believe a real balloon popping would look like. might as well simulate it thoroughly, though).

then maybe for a separate demonstration, show how the waves travel outward from the center point to a microphone, and you show how the pressure wave is converted into a voltage, helping people grok how this stuff works, etc.

(then maybe a separate one would show the voltage wave being digitized?)

Articles I am basically done contributing to

(Not updated anymore. New users all do this and then give it up after a while.) :-)

Electronics
- Gyrator, Schmitt trigger, Comparator, Voltage divider, Current mirror, Series and parallel circuits, Resistor, Capacitor, Electrolytic capacitor, Inductor, Bel, Darlington transistor, Electronic amplifier, Jack plug, Operational amplifier, Flip flop, Transconductance, Damping factor, Output impedance, Input impedance, Shannon-Hartley theorem, Bandwidth, Decibel, Crystal oscillator, Quartz clock

Signal processing
- Short term Fourier transform, Spectrogram, Chirp, Audio system measurements, Audiophile, Hilbert transform, Analytic signal

Electromagnetics
- Ferrofluid, Magnetic levitation, Magnetic levitation train, Magnet, Hysteresis, Halbach array, Solenoid, Earnshaw's theorem, Electric charge, Triboelectric effect, Static electricity

Thermodynamics
- Heat transfer, Fire, Frederick Guthrie, Owen Willans Richardson, Richardson constant, Thermal diode, Thermoelectricity, Peltier-Seebeck effect, Thermopower

Physics
- Sonoluminescence, Bubble fusion, List of nuclear accidents, Nuclear accident terminology, Ball lightning

Geology
- Cleavage, Dolomite

Biology
- Animal shell

Music
- Mathematics of musical scales, Physics of music, Beat, Mixing console, Electric violin, Electroencephalophone, Computer music programming languages

Rad chilies
- Achewood

Electronics diagrams

I have been making electronics diagrams using klunky schematic editor, and modifying and annotating the screen shots in paint shop (but I'm learning the GIMP). I convert them to 2-color (they are originally JPEGs with several shades of white) and save them as PNG, with transparent backgrounds. They tend to be very small (~1 KB). I have been using Arial size 10 for labels, bolded for titles, but I have switched to Tahoma since it has a nicer I and is a bit easier to read. I welcome requests and suggestions.

See Omegatron/Gallery.

Modified version of Klunky

I have made a modified version of Klunky, reducing the file sizes of the images and adding a bunch more images, such as batteries and voltmeters, etc. Also it just runs a lot faster if you have it on your own machine. It is available for download from http://mysite.verizon.net/negatron/klunky.zip Just unzip to a directory and open klunky.html. The author of the original considers his version to be public domain. If you know JavaScript and want to make it work in more browsers, that would be helpful...

Modular electronics schematics

I decided this is a stupid idea, and am just waiting around for SVG image support.

We could add all the images to the wikipedia and use them to create modifiable schematics:

		R₁

V₁		R₂

This won't work with huge fonts, but could be used otherwise. Can't be made extra pretty, either, but it might have its uses. Yet another reason to have a separate table namespace...

Forced PNG rendering

I figured out a way to force PNG rendering of TeX markup, as it was needed on the resistor page. It is possible to force the formula to render as PNG, without affecting the display of the formula, by adding \, (small space) at the end of the formula (where it is not rendered). This will force PNG if the user is in "HTML if simple" mode, but not for "HTML if possible" mode (math rendering settings in Preferences).

You can also use \,\! (small space and negative space, which cancel out) anywhere inside the math tags. This does force PNG in "HTML if possible" mode, unlike \,.

This could be useful to keep the rendering of formulae in a proof consistent, for example, or to fix formulae that render incorrectly in HTML (at one time, a^{2+2} rendered with an extra underscore), or to demonstrate how something is rendered when it would normally show up as HTML.

For instance:

Syntax	How it looks rendered
a^{2+2}	$a 2 + 2$
a^{2\,\!+2} renders the same	$a^{2\,\!+2}$
a^{2+2} \, renders the same	$a^{2+2} \,$
a^{2\,+2} is bad	$a^{2\,+2}$
\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx	$\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx$
\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx \,	$\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx \,$
\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx \,\!	$\int_{-N}^{N} e^x\, dx \,\!$
\,\!\int_{-\,\!\,\!\,\!N}^{N} \,\!\,\!\,\!e\,\!^x\,\!\, dx \,\!	$\,\!\int_{-\,\!\,\!\,\!N}^{N} \,\!\,\!\,\!e\,\!^x\,\!\, dx \,\!$

You might want to include a comment in the HTML so people don't "correct" the formula by removing it:

Spell checker

I've experimentally started spell checking entire articles occasionally with the Spellbound extension in Firefox. I have the American, Australian, British, Canadian, and New Zealandic dictionaries, but use the American or British for convenience. If there is a mix of words from both I use whichever is the majority for consistency. ("Note that the English form of Wikipedia has no preference for American, British or other forms of English so long as this is consistent for the whole page.") Occasionally it "corrects" a word wrongly and I miss it. Sorry.

Guidelines for changing dialects:

If you think a page should be in a specific dialect because of the subject matter, like Department of National Defence (Canada), point it out and I will run through it with the appropriate dictionary.

See User_talk:Omegatron/Talk_archive_1#Spelling

[[User:Omegatron#Spell_checker|Spell checker]] - using US English

[[User:Omegatron#Spell_checker|Spell checker]] - using UK English