User:Benjamin Mako Hill

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Languages en This user is a native speaker of English. am-2 ይህ/ቾ አባል በመካከለኛ ደረጃ አማርኛ ማቀነባበር ይችላሉ። fr-1 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau élémentaire de français.
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This user lives in or hails from Seattle. MIT This user attends or attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Hampshire College This user attends or attended Hampshire College. This user contributes using Debian. Ub This user contributes using Ubuntu. This user is into free software.

I have created many Wikpedia user accounts — many of which I have now forgotten and some of which I have not — and have edited many pages without any accounts at all. Settling down seems to come with age so I'm creating this account which I have reason to believe will be difficult to forget.

I have more webpages than I can reasonably count and my current policy to to try to not aggrevate this problem so I'm going to be brief.

If you want to know more about me, you can read the Wikipedia article about me although I will not edit that page myself (except for minor stylistic issues) because I'm not sure that doing this is a good idea and it might make the contents suspect. Also, it's not really necessary because I have many webpages where I talk a lot about myself, my projects, and other things that I do. If you are interested in this, you can read any of the pages linked below:

• My Homepage
• Copyrighteous (My Blog)
• My Up-To-Date Contact Information

Please don't hesitate to get a hold of me by editing my talk page or by emailing me at mako@atdot.cc or any of the methods mentioned in the pages above.

Contents 1 Items of interests 2 Items of disapprobation 3 People I Know Who Edit Wikipedia 4 Trans-Siberian goals 5 List of Mnemonics I Have Trouble Remembering

[edit] Items of interests

The following things have been interesting to me recently:

• Pseudoscorpions (Ick!)
• Gut flora (what a name!)
• The Acronym/Initialism debate
• Pigbutt worm AKA Flying buttocks *
• Pope John Paul I
• Tides, tidal physics and tidal forces (thanks for helping teach me Sj)
• Codex Ixtlilxochitl and the process of learning how to pronounce it.
• Sundials and the presence of mean seconds(!)
• Schuyler Erle *
• Narrative of the Life of James Allen, alias Jonas Pierce, alias James H. York, alias Burley Grove, the Highwayman, Being His Death-bed Confession to the Warden of the Massachusetts State Prison * by James Allen (highwayman) *
• William Blades and his book, The Enemies of Books *
• The World Carrot Museum (which recently surived a WP:AfD, phew!) *
• In necessariis unitas, in dubiis libertas, in omnibus caritas
• The thermal grill illusion *
• Cloud chambers
• Exquisite Corpse
• The Bernoulli Effect
• The French Revolutionary Calendar
• Eric Raymond (villain) *
• Coconut milk which can apparently be used as intravenous fluid!
• "What did you bring that book that I didn't want to be read to out of up for?" [1]
• Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo: Wow!
• Sea dragons, both leafy or weedy
• Granrojo: A giant red jellyfish.*
• Salps: jellies that are part of the family chordata and more therefore more closely related to vertebrates than to most other jellyfish.
• Blue holes (WP could use more pictures!)
• Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den: Wow.
• Scott James Remnant * and Jeff Waugh * (co-workers rom Canonical Ltd.)
• Walter Bender * (my old adviser at the MIT Media Lab)
• Bottle scraper AKA Flessenlikker AKA Flessenschraper: My first (and in all likelihood) best article in Wikipedia! *
• Mika Matsuzaki: I've been trying to figure her out for many years now.

[edit] Items of disapprobation

Some things I think the world might be better without or items that, in current or common usage, could and should be improved upon greatly:

• The phrase "language speaking country" (e.g., English speaking country or French speaking country). Countries don't speak languages, people do.
• Private property in ideas
• Borders
• Imperial units, English units and U.S. customary units
• Meat
• Biblioclasts and other enemies of books *
• Timezones
• Television
• US Letter paper (in favor of A4)
• United States bank notes and coinage

[edit] People I Know Who Edit Wikipedia

Mostly just a list of Wikipedians I know and work with so I can follow-up on their edits to see if I want to edit any of their articles or so I can ask them for help if I'm stuck.

• Daf
• Schoen
• Madprime
• Sj
• Aaron
• Erik Garrison
• Erik Moeller
• Mika

[edit] Trans-Siberian goals

I've been thinking for a long time about things I might want learn while taking the trans-Siberian railroad from Vladivostok to St. Petersburg.

So far, my list includes:

• Flipping a coin while walking.
• Card counting
• Polyphony through whistling

[edit] List of Mnemonics I Have Trouble Remembering

See the list of mnemonics article for more mnemonics including many that I never knew or don't have trouble remembering, but that you might have trouble with.

I have trouble remembering many mnemonics including the ones in the following list. In some situations (i.e., the planet names) I have no problem remembering the referent (i.e., the planet names) and must them as a mnemonic for the mnemonic itself:

• Notes on the lines of the Bass clef: Good Boys Do Fine Always
• Differentiating stalactites and stalagmites (I can't remember if the operative preposition is from or to): Stalactites project downward from the ceiling and stalagmites project upward from the ground.
• The planets (now that Pluto is not a planet, we all have to remember a new mnemonic): My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Noodles
• Trigonometric functions: Chief Sohcahtoa (Soh: sine opposite hypotenuse, etc.)
• The poem used to to remember British monarchs (This seems only marginally easier to remember than the list. Luckily, I am not British so this is probably forgivable in my case):

Willie Willie Harry Stee	(William I, William II, Henry I, Stephen)
Harry Dick John Harry three;	(Henry II, Richard I, John, Henry III)
One two three Neds, Richard two	(Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, Richard II)
Harrys four five six, then who?	(Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI)
Edwards four five, Dick the bad,	(Edward IV, Edward V, Richard III)
Harrys (twain), Ned six (the lad);	(Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI)
Mary, Bessie, James you ken,	(Mary I, Elizabeth I, James I)
Then Charlie, Charlie, James again...	(Charles I, Charles II, James II)
Will and Mary, Anna Gloria,	(William III, Mary II, Anne)
Georges four, Will four, Victoria;	(George I, George II , George III , George IV , William IV , Victoria )
Edward seven next, and then	(Edward VII)
Came George the fifth in nineteen-ten;	(George V)
Ned the eighth soon abdicated	(Edward VIII)
Then George six was coronated;	(George VI)
After which Elizabeth	(Elizabeth II)
Has the throne, until her death

• Old elephants have much skin (Remembering the names of the Great Lakes in their correct order.)
• Resistor color band colors: Black beetles running on your garden bring very good weather
• Daylight savings time: Spring forward, fall back.
• Hierarchy of the taxonomy in Biology (In this case, there are so many of them that I'm confused as to which mnemonic, if any, are correct): King Phillip Came Over For Great Spagetti
• Geological eras (i.e., Precambrian, Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous): Pregnant Camels Ordinarily Sit Down Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak
• Which side are men and women's buttons sewn onto normally: Women are always, right.
• How to tie a bowline (Well, I remember this one but it doesn't help me remember how to tie the knot because other information, like what the scene looks like, is not included in the mnemonic):

The fox comes out of his hole,

Runs round the tree,

And goes back into his hole.