Wikipedia:Babel
en This user is a native speaker of the English language. zh 該用戶的母語是中文。 该用户的母语是中文。 fr-3 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau avancé de français. de-3 Dieser Benutzer hat sehr gute Deutschkenntnisse. it-3 Questo utente può contribuire con un livello avanzato di italiano. es-2 Este usuario puede contribuir con un nivel intermedio de español. ru-2 Этот участник неплохо знает русский язык. pl-2 Ten użytkownik posługuje się językiem polskim na poziomie średnio zaawansowanym. ja-2 この利用者は中級の日本語ができます。 vi-1 Thành viên này sử dụng tiếng Việt với trình độ cơ bản. R-2 This user is an intermediate R programmer. MAT-1 This user is a beginner MATLAB programmer. py-1 This user is a beginning Python programmer. -3 This user is an advanced LaTeX user.
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Lurker since 2006, editor since 2009. I tend to oscillate somewhat between these states.

100,000 edits! :D

Babel following definitions of Wikipedia:Babel/Levels. They reflect my ability for reading/listening rather than writing/speaking, because I learnt most of them through reading texts. When it comes to writing, it is only accurate if you allow me a dictionary. :) Additionally, they vary more or less by one level depending on how long it has been since I've last used them. But still, I mostly edit English WP, because it is the most spoken language after all (even Chinese is only second).

I wish it was standard to transcribe Chinese proper names into Pinyin with tone marks (just like how one would not strip off tone marks from Vietnamese names). (They're not that necessary in running text, because the context is usually enough to clarify things. But with proper names, you can't really tell).

I have edited significantly on inorganic chemistry, Solar System astronomy, geometry, classical music, and chess (including variants; among regional variants, mostly the historical shogi variants). In no particular order.

My favourite star is Spica. (Present company excepted, naturally.) With the analogous caveat, my favourite planets are Mercury and Venus. We have so few rocky planetary bodies to study, and I'd like to know more about Earth's siblings! At least for Luna and Mars we've had many more missions. (I mostly think of "planet" geophysically, so Luna, Io, and Europa are another three rocky planets.) Also, I feel like they are now often unfairly overlooked in the popular imagination in favour of the planets further out, though of course I'd like to know more about those as well. Since I think of "planet" geophysically, for me the lower limit is collapse of most porosity to form a solid, round body, and the upper limit is the onset of hydrogen burning and becoming a red dwarf: for me, brown dwarfs are just high-mass planets (most of them would've stopped fusing deuterium by now, anyway). Of course this has some issues with the lower end, but I'm inclined to think "planetoid" is a good enough fuzzy word for things like Pallas, Vesta, or Hygiea. Maybe also very low-density Tethys and some TNOs like (55637) 2002 UX25. And maybe also Psyche (probably differentiated, but too small to be round).

I'm a fan of V=L, and I wish it had the status AC currently enjoys among mathematicians. That is: I don't reject universes where V=L is false, or universes where AC is false; but they don't conform to my "intuitive" picture of sets. So, if you like, I subscribe to Joel D. Hamkins' multiverse view, but just find the constructible universe to be the one that nicely axiomatises my fuzzy mental image of sets (and, I would suspect, that of most mathematicians who are not set-theorists). Maybe one can compare it to a hypothetical person who accepts the existence of multiple geometries, and finds them all interesting, but still insists that the fuzzy geometry in her head, that she thinks of by default, is best axiomatised by Euclidean geometry. Although to be truly analogous, I suppose she would have to live in a world where people are talking about absolute geometry more than Euclidean or hyperbolic geometry. At the very least I would insist on GCH, per this paper by Hamkins, which points out that it greatly improves the categoricity situation for hyperreal fields. (I found this MathOverflow discussion interesting as a starting point if one wants to think about those issues, BTW.)

If you ask me "does infinity exist in the real Universe", though, I'd probably answer: who knows, but Platonic existence is still some kind of useful existence even if it doesn't equate to existence in the real Universe.

Also a believer in P=NP. See this Don Knuth interview for why (it's question 17).

I think it would've been better had we chosen to write numbers by default in octal rather than decimal. But oh well, at least binary and its powers are heavily used by computers. (Hexadecimal seems to have slightly too big a multiplication table to consider giving it to kids.) :)

1.e4 is best by test, Fischer was right about that. And the best answer is 1...e5. But hey, if you're not a GM, just about anything sensible will be fine. (My taste in openings is Alekhine vs 1.e4 and Chigorin vs 1.d4. :D) The fact that computers play much better chess than we do does not stop us from having fun. We wouldn't have victories and defeats without mistakes. Antichess survives as a game despite being solved, and let's face it: practically chess is already weakly solved by Stockfish NNUE. Though, if normal chess is not exciting enough for you, why not try the Capablanca-family variants? :)

The correct version of the periodic table, insofar as there is one for a model (so let's say: the consistent version), has helium in group 2. You can have it as Charles Janet's form (below), or keep the s-block at the left end just like usual (because quantum effects lower s orbital energies and so the big energy gap happens before them), but either way 1s² overrides chemical properties. :) As Eric Scerri has pointed out, the periodic table classifies abstract elements (atoms with their electronic structure) that are preserved across chemical conditions, not elements as simple substances that are not: salt contains sodium and chlorine the atoms, and their overlapping orbitals, but it doesn't contain sodium the reactive metal and chlorine the toxic gas. Otherwise, it would be difficult to understand why nitrogen and bismuth are in the same group. Actually this reassignment is starting to get more and more serious consideration these days, but it goes without saying that I do not support changing our default periodic table format on Wikipedia just yet. For me, an element is philosophically a type of atom (as distinguished by Z); you place an element on the PT by considering its characteristic set of valence electrons and orbitals when engaging in bonding interactions with other kinds of atom. Mendeleev was kind of doing this by proxy by considering valences as primary for group assignments, and once the quantum revolution happened, we understood why that worked.

Yes, the classification into blocks ignores relativity, but it doesn't matter too much. It will probably matter for period 8, but that is still theoretical and more calculations in that area would be helpful. And honestly, putting elements past 118 or so on the normal periodic table is inherently difficult, since they will be inescapably relativistic and cannot be expected to follow the old pattern. Doing so is inherently a simplification to an even greater degree than it would be for the elements we already know: that is not to say that we shouldn't do it, but we should go into this with our eyes open. The destruction of the Madelung rule in period 8 (because of intruder levels) is also important, as does the fact that it is really one end on a continuum ranging from neutral atoms to hydrogen-like atoms. (Once you remove two electrons, (n-1)d and (n-2)f fall below ns, e.g. Ca [Ar]4s² vs Ti²⁺ [Ar]3d².) It is what makes me sceptical of group-theoretic approaches to justifying Madelung: what, are they going to happily continue past 118 and "prove" that probably tin-like element 168 is a noble gas? What about the "wrong" position of 9s? The Madelung rule is rather something that we need to study experimentally, with justifications like Demkov-Ostrovsky being a better way to look at it from QM principles, choosing the potential that seems to approximate things best just like the nuclear shell model. No one complains about that there; indeed, a Nobel Prize got awarded for it. :)

With analogous caveats about what's actually necessary for life, I vote for mercury as a favourite elemental metal, and fluorine as a favourite elemental nonmetal. I am defining this in the Mott sense of whether the stable phase at absolute zero conducts or not. Periodicity makes polonium, astatine, and radon fairly interesting, but I hesitate to call them "favourites" because they are not known well and are unhealthier to be around than mercury. Nonetheless it is really a shame that they are unstable, because they would finally put paid to the school myth that groups show homogeneous behaviour (false) and that astatine must therefore be a black solid (calculated to be probably false). Metallicity appears at some point when we go down groups 13 to 16, so why shouldn't it eventually happen in groups 17 and 18? I suspect oganesson would be a metal. :)

I think the superheavies exist, but not quite in the same way that tungsten or even plutonium exists. Their existence is mostly potential rather than actual, with the exception that we can turn it into reality briefly in the relevant facilities. As far as existence of Og vs existence of 119 goes, it's really a matter of human knowledge as far as I'm concerned: we're sure the former can be made, and so it exists in that sense, whereas we are not yet sure about the latter (though of course everyone expects that it will exist). Of course there is a continuum as half-lives decrease, not to mention other factors: I think francium exists more than dubnium does. Once we get far enough, and reach Z values where every possible nuclide would not survive long enough to get an electron cloud, then I'll agree that the element does not exist in this world. I suspect the continent of stability is likely: just as covalent bonding gives way to metallic bonding, so should individual baryons give way to quark matter.

There are no singularities in the real world, only gaps in our current picture of physics. But that's just me spewing opinions. :)

I have a lot of favourite composers in classical music, but if you ask what period I love the best: the Classical period and the first Romantic generation. (Well, Franz Schubert will forever stand between them, and his music has a special place in my heart.) I'd also mention Charles-Valentin Alkan as a perhaps not-too-well-known name who is also on my list of favourites. Also, considering all the chemistry edits I do, it would be odd not to mention Alexander Borodin explicitly, though he's later than what I'm most keen on. :) I wish the standard range of the piano was F0-F8. And also that the standard piano was 7/8-sized. Seriously, for me ninths hurt and tenths are impossible except in slow passages on the edge (e.g. the end of Schumann's Fantaisie, 1st movement). It is truly aggravating to find the chromatic scales in thirds in the Don Juan Fantasy easier than the leaping tenths in the left hand in the ensuing variations. That's not how it's supposed to work! For similar reasons I actually find the Chopin Op 10/2 etude easier than 10/1. :( But octaves are okay; I can play the Erlkönig accompaniment without strain. (A tip: whenever the other hand is not playing, you can split the octaves between hands, 3-2-1 in each, to give yourself a break.)

My favourite Bach cantata is BWV 179.

Fixed do is pointless in English (and German, and other languages that use letter names). We already have an absolute system for note names: they're just letters. "Do" should always be the local tonic, whether major, minor, or whatever other mode. So the minor scale is do-re-me-fa-so-le-ti-do. The major scale is fundamental, and the parallel minor scale comes as an alteration of it: for me, the closest minor key to C major is not A minor (the relative) but C minor (the parallel). Also, the really "natural" minor scale is the harmonic minor. (The tonic must be minor; the dominant must be major to be functional; so we need a minor subdominant to keep the minor chords in the majority in the most important three.) The variable degrees (6th, 7th, Neapolitan 2nd) arise as chromatic alterations to avoid awkwardness in the circle of fifths, because here the diminished fifth is so much closer to the tonic. Well, in major or minor the circle of fifths is I-IV-VII-III-VI-II-V-I; but in major the d5 is IV-VII, whereas in minor it is either VI-II or N-V (N meaning Neapolitan ♭II). For this reason, movable do with la-based minor is the one thing I would admit is worse than fixed do, because it doesn't make sense: it is not consistent about making "do" the tonic, which was the entire point of movable do. And I say this while having perfect pitch (albeit with the ability to switch to thinking in functions, read transposed scores, and reset A to 415 Hz if needed; nonetheless, A = 392 Hz is too much for me to accept).

For languages that already use the sol-fa note names as the absolute names of the notes, I guess scale degree numbers are the best option I can think of, though syllable count might be an issue. For atonal music, singing the German note names isn't a bad option: as long as you stay in single-sharp or single-flat territory (which atonal music really should anyway), they are all monosyllabic.

I wish my heroes George Gamow (nice interview with him) and Lev Landau had gotten elements, like Einstein and Fermi did. Okay, actually I have many other heroes as well across fields, e.g. Li Shanlan, Yuen-ren Chao, David Bronstein, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ... But Gamow and Landau are my physicist heroes. :)

The Sun and Moon existed from the beginning of Arda (and yes, Venus too; it existed before Eärendil). It is only a pity that Tolkien never completed the revisions (then again, it's not like he completed many other things either). Though what does "canonical" mean, when the author left the work unfinished, other than a fan's personal taste? I usually take later texts as my personal canon, to the extent of actually going for unstained Galadriel at the time I write this (though okay, I flip-flop on that a lot; happy to take Telerin Celeborn without reservations, though). I just wish he had lived a little bit longer to rewrite a few more narratives in some more ways contradicting the earlier drafts (and doubtless another few hundred pages about the languages and worldbuilding). My favourite character to think about is Míriel Þerindë.

Although, regarding the username: it's for the musical accidental. Not the expression, which by coincidence appears in LOTR ("At the Sign of the Prancing Pony"). :)

This user is one of the 900 most active English Wikipedians of all time.

This user has been on Wikipedia for 15 years, 4 months and 7 days.