Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 02:46, 12 December 2004

I'm a professional geek, of the maths/engineering variety. I work in the vision correction industry, but I don't post much on that subject - partly because a lot of my professional knowledge is commercial-in-confidence, but mostly because I come to Misplaced Pages for a break from work.

I'm a dual US/Australian national, born in California and living in Sydney.

Due to occasional stalker problems (none current), I prefer not to use my real name in a searchable venue, so I pinched 'Calair' from a favourite roleplaying character.

I try to keep my edits NPOV, but so the curious can better judge whether my edits are Fair & Balanced, some information on me and my biases...

I love science, especially when it's mathematical.

I detest 'factoids', those catchy little bits of trivia that everybody hears, believes, and repeats, without checking to see whether they're actually true. Stuff like "It's not compulsory to vote in Australian elections, only to get marked off the roll" or "Hair and nails continue growing after death". I would rather remove a false fact from Misplaced Pages than add a true one. This doesn't mean I don't make mistakes myself :-)

I'm a member of the Australian Greens. This doesn't mean I'd want them running the country tomorrow; it means I'd like to live in a country where human rights issues are taken as seriously as economic ones, and long-term environmental issues get more consideration than they do, and at present I see increasing the Greens' influence as the best way to do that. Don't even get me started on the US political and electoral systems...

Speaking of human rights, that includes LGBTI rights. IMHO, the State's job is not to make choices for adults, but rather to assist them to make their own informed decisions. On gay marriage, my preferred policy would be to divorce the legal aspect of relationships from the religious one altogether - put the government in charge of legal partnerships to facilitate things like inheritance/child custody, and let each church and religion decide for themselves whose relationships they'll recognise as 'marriage'.

I am the step-parent of a twelve-year-old child.

I try to be courteous to people, but I have a tendency towards snarkishness. This is not something I'm proud of; if you see me doing this, do me a favour and point it out so I can fix it up.

Pet peeve: Wikipedians who complain that an article is POV because "it doesn't mention $IMPORTANT_FACT". Instead of doing this, how about amending the article so it does mention $IMPORTANT_FACT?

Contributions

Lots of minor stuff, especially spelling/grammar. Major contributions:

• Anti-Australian sentiment - still not convinced this should be a page of its own, but it survived VfD, so I tried to improve it by adding historical context, mention of human rights, East Timor etc.

• Eye surgery, Laser eye surgery, LASIK, and Refractive surgery - restructured & reduced duplication between these sites; attempted to steer towards NPOV on the "refractive surgery is the work of Satan" issue.

• Family First Party - rewrote much of this for NPOV, added policy information.

• Katana - edited for length and focus.

• Media Watch (Australian TV series) - created from scratch. Needs more content, as do related pages.

• Polyamory - fleshed out 'values of' & 'criticisms of'.

• Shared universe - added discussion of amateur forms (especially net-based writing).

• Wikipedians contributing under CC BY-SA 1.0
• Wikipedians contributing under CC BY-SA 2.0