User:Benjamin Mako Hill



In my day job, I teach and do research at the University of Washington. I am also an active editor on several wikis and work with the Wikimedia community and the Wikimedia Foundation community to support academic research related to wikis and Wikimedia in a number of ways. Please see my user page on meta for more information.

I have created many Wikipedia 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 created this account which I have reason to believe will be difficult to forget.

I teach using Wikipedia. You can often find my students my students are contributing to Wikipedia as part of their assignments.

I have more webpages than I can reasonably count and my current policy is to try not to aggravate 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 because I think doing so might make the contents suspect. Also, 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.

Elsewhere in my userspace...

 * List of mnemonics I have trouble remembering
 * List of animals that are also verbs
 * List of Google front-ends in various colors
 * List of homophonous phrases
 * List of unintentionally offensive product names
 * User:Benjamin Mako Hill/Ghosts in CASBS Study ww

Items of interests
The following things have been interesting to me recently:


 * Lawnchair Larry flight
 * Arcosanti
 * Freemen on the land
 * Banangos
 * Mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and this List of United States mobile virtual network operators — I'd wondered where all these weird mobile companies I'd never heard of were coming from!
 * Japanese WWII holdouts like Shoichi Yokoi, Hiroo Onoda and Teruo Nakamura who in some cases were still attacking people and fighting into the mid 1970s!
 * Shepard tone - My future ringtone!
 * Mellified man or human mummy confection
 * Qolo (food)
 * X (disambiguation) XX (disambiguation) XXX (disambiguation) and XXXX (disambiguation); also WP:X, WP:XX and WP:XXX
 * M. E. Hart AKA MC Double Def DP
 * User:JackSchmidt/List of snowclones
 * Continental Lite
 * Functionalism (sociology) (FIX ME)
 * Chris King Precision Components
 * Canalization (psychology)
 * Traumatic insemination
 * Charles Kane and Charles Kane (businessman)
 * Jim Gettys (villain) and Jim Gettys (technologist)
 * Maillard reaction
 * Schmidt Sting Pain Index (Awesome descriptions!)
 * Double-flowered
 * Brown Betty (teapot)
 * The War of Heaven (wonderful info box!)
 * The northern short-tailed shrew is venomous and will eat each other from hunger after 2 hours
 * Codex Seraphinianus - I HAVE WHAT I WANT
 * Zoophilia and health: Amazing article!
 * Brood X
 * The Bloop, Trunko, cryptozoology and cryptids
 * Rat laughter
 * Khomut
 * Friendly Floatees
 * Unit bias
 * Happyland (novel) *
 * Solo violin partita No. 2 (Bach)
 * Eggcorns and Malapropisms
 * Quolls and Quokkas
 * Fetus in Fetu. Ick!
 * Mark Lewis (filmmaker) *
 * Epigenetics
 * List of intrastate Interstate Highways
 * List of homophonous phrases forked out of Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
 * Emu oil which is actually made of Emu! Yikes!
 * Earth Station 5 *
 * Politics of Nature *
 * Commensalism, in which millipedes catch rides on birds!
 * Condoleezza Rice (the oil tanker not the person)
 * Easily confusable vegetarians like Albert Einstein and Brendan Donnelly
 * Chiromantis: their mating process is almost indistinguishable from a foam party!
 * Pseudoscorpions (Ick!)
 * Gut flora (what a name!)
 * The Acronym/Initialism debate
 * Pigbutt worm AKA Flying buttocks *
 * Pope John Paul I and all the Pope John Paul I conspiracy theories
 * 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?"
 * 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 from 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.
 * Mika Matsuzaki: I've been trying to figure her out for many years now.

(* I started or created contributed major bits of these articles.)

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
 * Middle endian US-style date notation

Trans-Siberian goals
I've been thinking for a long time about things I might want to 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

English Wikipedia Todo List

 * Eliminate Permissive and copyleft licenses by merging it articles in permissive software license, copyleft, and free software license
 * Build out, reference, and clean up Earthstation 5