User:99th Percentile

99th Percentile is the Wikipedia alias of Tom Fairlie, a 40-something male living in Lakeville, Minnesota in the midwestern United States.

My alias is based upon the IQ score that I received when testing to enter Mensa.

Before you make light of this achievement (as most friends and acquaintances tend to :-), consider this:
 * I met my wife-to-be at the first Mensa meeting I attended (we never went again and are now happily married with four children)
 * I truly believe that even someone with a 1-in-a-100 IQ still only knows <1% of all knowledge

My formal education is in engineering and computer science and I currently earn my living as a senior systems engineering manager in the medical industry.

Politically, I am dead center in the libertarian left (according to the Political Compass, my scores are: Economic Left/Right: -5.25 and Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.82). Although I am an independent voter, frustrated by the lack of promise of both major parties, I tend to eschew the Republican Party. Historically speaking, they have been the party of elitism and exclusion. More recently, they have been the party of the big lie, willing to compromise practically every conservative principle for the sake of electoral victory and the consolidation of power. Democrats, on the other hand, can hardly be accused of such lying, since they have no identifiable platform on which to base such an accusation.

Favorite pages (warning: not all of these are fun)

 * Apalachin Meeting
 * Averageness
 * Emperor Norton
 * Mike the Headless Chicken
 * Kenneth Pinyan

Pages improved, so to speak (listed chronologically)

 * Batman (TV series): Added trivia regarding Mickey Dolenz and his role as one of Shame's henchmen. Later removed (see below).
 * Fletch (film): Added reference to Kevin Smith's quote from the Howard Stern Show (30JUN2006). (Ultimately removed; could not find a citation)
 * The Death Collector: Cleaned up the formatting to Wikify this article a bit.
 * Display resolution: Added the venerable Atari 400/800 computer to the table of common display resolutions.
 * Gore Vidal: Made a minor grammatical change.
 * Reubens: Cleaned up the farmer/rube reference on the Reubens disambiguation page.
 * Lost in Translation (film): Updated the "Reaction" section to mention Sofia Coppola's "cheating".
 * October 21: Added reference to Comet Ikeya-Seki as a major event under this day.
 * Barbary pirate: Cleaned up POV and grammatical problems in the "After 1815" section.
 * Cold War: Added H. R. Shapiro's views to the "Historiography" section. Later removed by Rjensen (see below).
 * Symbology: Added a hyperlink to Robert A. Heinlein's page and cleaned up the article a bit.
 * Virginia Tech shootings: Added a reference to the Bath School disaster to add a little context (yuck, what monsters we breed).
 * An Assassin's Diary: Added a reference to Gore Vidal's comparison of Arthur Bremer's prose to Howard Hunt's.
 * William Bruce Pitzer: Changed title of last section to "Allegations surrounding death" from "Urban legend?".
 * An Assassin's Diary: Moved paragraph on Gore Vidal's comparison to its own section.

Lost changes

 * From the Historiography section in Cold War: Another interesting theory was put forward by H. R. Shapiro in Democracy in America: A Political History of the United States, 1620-1789/1984 (1986). Shapiro suggests that President Truman instigated the Cold War, at least in part, due to the political crisis he faced in the wake of Roosevelt's death. Without any significant support from either Democrats or Republicans, Truman quickly adopted a firm anti-communist stance and effectively threw out Roosevelt's Yalta agreements with Stalin. Quickly gaining some Republican support and paralyzing the Democrats, Truman's actions constituted a de facto putsch that bought him time, both domestically and abroad, for crafting a more rigorous strategy. His long-term approach was to maintain a policy of non-engagement with Stalin, use the UN as leverage for increasing the American sphere of influence, and place the United States on a permanent warlike footing. Truman's actions were codified in National Security Council Report 68 and the creation of the Department of Defense.
 * From Batman (TV series): They took out my reference to a Mickey Dolenz cameo. Now I cannot find the source again. Ugh! I'm stuck watching YouTube until I can find it again.