User:Tamfang

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Userboxes foo This user is unique just like everyone else. INTP This user's MBTI type is INTP. This user's favourite colour is green. This user is interested in polyhedra. en This user is a native speaker of English. blz-3 This user is a fluent speaker of blazon. fr-2 Cet utilisateur peut contribuer avec un niveau intermédiaire en français. eo-2 Ĉi tiu uzanto povas komuniki per meza nivelo de Esperanto. it-1 Questo utente può contribuire con un livello semplice di italiano. la-1 Hic usor simplici latinitate contribuat. ... This user would like to be able to speak more languages. ipa-2 ə This user has an intermediate understanding of the International Phonetic Alphabet. 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 full stop. C-2 This user is an intermediate C programmer. py-2 This user is an intermediate Python programmer. This user is interested in Heraldry This user enjoys singing. This user is owned by one or more cats. This user supports the legalization of all drugs for adults. This user opposes gun control. This user identifies as an Anarchist. This user rejects all forms of Marxist thinking This user prefers Mozilla Firefox. This user runs Mac OS X. ? This user would like to know where Guamania is. This user is a Reference desk regular.

Contents 1 I'm just this bloke 1.1 the handle 2 subpages 3 pet peeves (language)

[edit] I'm just this bloke

I'm Anton Sherwood, one more middle-aged adolescent with a library, a modem and no life.

I love Baroque and world fusion music; the sunlight of a late afternoon in spring; making what I call mathematical doodles with 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, Pulitzer or Ig Nobel Prize. I did get a Knuth reward check, though. (Before I decided what to do with it – scan it then cash it, or just frame it? – it was lost in clutter, and probably went out with the trash.)

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.

I've made many edits in the areas of polytopes, heraldry and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I also precipitated the deletions of

• Earl of Amersham and Fürsts of Schwarzenberg, hoaxes by the same person
• Estalena, alleged to be a personal name in an unspecified American Indian language
• Icosahedral–hexagonal grids in weather prediction (redirected)

[edit] the handle

Tamfang, in case you were wondering, is 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 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.

[edit] subpages

User:Tamfang/blazons (in 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/Stuart is a list of descendants of King James VI & I who were born before the death of Queen Anne (1714) and died after the flight of James II (1688), 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.

User:Tamfang/scratchpad is old junk. What's the template for "please delete me"?

User:Tamfang/Yngling is a prettier version of Template:Yngling, but the data are unreliable anyway.

[edit] pet peeves (language)

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".
• There is [noun] [modifier] should usually be changed to [noun] is [modifier]. The modifier is most often a participle — There were seven votes cast (change to Seven votes were cast) — but I've also seen this irritating pattern with adjectives.
  • Similarly, in Candida glabrata I changed there has been no observed mating activity to no mating activity has been observed.
• comprise and compose are (approximately) reciprocal, not synonyms. New York City is composed of five boroughs; New York City comprises five boroughs.
• 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.
• bogus precision: 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. Don't write $176,000,000,000.00; each of those zeroes is probably wrong. (Write "$176 billion" instead.)