User:Catbar

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Just another resident of Hotel Wikipedia.

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About me
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator: INTP

If you want to know a bit about me: I'm a Ph.D. analytical chemist who really never used his degree directly. I've had a lot of experience with computers, statistics, and simulation, and it turns out those lead to more interesting employment, as well as more interesting resumes. If you want to find stuff related to my technical background, Google "Brian Rock" and 1) "chemometrics" or 2) "ion thruster". This won't get any hits against my dissertation, "Development of an Optical Emission Model for the Determination of Sputter Rates in Ion Thruster Propulsion Systems". For some odd reason, my dissertation seems to be invisible on the web.



I grew up to some degree in Saint Joseph, Missouri USA, went to school at the University of Missouri–Rolla (Rolla, Missouri) and Arizona State University (Tempe, Arizona), worked numerous summers for Phillips Petroleum Company in Bartlesville, Oklahoma and now live in Akron, Ohio.

Other places where I've spent some significant time are Kingston and Napanee, Ontario, Dillsburg, Pennsylvania, and Lawton, Oklahoma.

Here's a link to a picture I took a few years ago in New Orleans that I'm proud of. Note: this view doesn't actually exist in the real world. An incredibly ugly building would normally be in the background. The weeping child Details about the picture

My Wikihistory
I've been active in Wikipedia since December, 2003 and I've been an administrator since early May, 2004. I see my role in Wikipedia, at this point, to cruise around looking for articles that just should be in any decent encyclopedia, but are missing from the Wikipedia, and give them a reasonable start. I don't do sub-stubs - my typical first efforts are 1000-1500 bytes long. As time and inclination permits, I return to enhance and expand them.

As I tool around, I also fix typos and add content to things that I care about and which need it. I can and like to do chemical structure drawings, so I add them as the fancy strikes me.

My interests
My especial interests are beer and homebrewing, wine and wine making, supercharged breeds of cats, like the Egyptian Mau cat and the American Keuda cat, chemistry, science, and engineering, computers, statistics, especially data mining and related areas, weather, biology, medicine, entertainers, movies, especially cult films, history and other things.

My homepages
You can find my web homepages at.

The sites above have some interesting stuff, including my An Introduction to Chemometrics, The Catbar Egyptian Mau Gallery, individual pages for our maus, The Shrine of the Unsung Musician, and an Ohio wines page.

Of special interest is Brain Candy Central, which contains a bunch of columns I have written for our local Mensa group's newsletter. Some of these have morphed to become Wikipedia articles, and others may do so soon.

Dot Project
Lately, I've been working on User:Sethant's Dot Project, which intends to display the location every US city and town on its state map. I've completed Missouri, which was a booger, because Missouri has a jillion counties, with a bunch of villages in each. St. Louis County, Missouri was the toughest, with 100 cities, towns and villages, and there were 110 other counties as well. The final tally was 974 maps uploaded, and of course 974 article edits for various Missouri places, plus I fixed a bunch of typos and irregularities I found, as well as placed some cities and towns in the correct counties, etc.

Then I worked on Arizona which had fewer cities, towns and especially counties, but the state of Missouri had a lot of good online and downloadable things I could use to speed things up (like good state maps) that Arizona doesn't have. Another complication: some Arizona towns were very tiny in the 1990 census and are sizable now. They don't all show up on the maps I could find. In these cases, I let my regression-predicted coordinates determine the position of the dot, but I preferred verifying positions with a map when I could.

This was followed by Ohio. Even more places than Missouri, but I had really excellent maps to help, so it was relatively easy. My regression predictions for point coordinates were very accurate for Ohio, too, so it went relatively quickly.

Next, I completed Louisiana. Unlike the other states I've done so far, I've never lived in or near Louisiana, so I didn't have any memories to draw on. The best Louisiana state map I found on-line was a rather slow-updating pdf file that was a real pain to work with. With the arrival of Squeezit, my new built-by-hand computer, things improved some.

Kansas is done as of late January, 2005. It was slow-going, to say the least. For Kansas, I found that using the Census Bureau's Tiger Map Server Browser at http://tiger.census.gov/ worked nicely for verifying and tweaking dot placement on a county-by-county basis.

I finished Arkansas in late February, 2005. The default Tiger Map Server Browser wasn't sufficient for the more densely populated counties of Arkansas, but I found out how to access an older version of the software (mapbrowser) that lets me specify the size of the output map. The bigger maps show more detail and solved my problem quite nicely. I wish I knew about this when I did Kansas. It would have helped, but it was necessary for Arkansas, since I didn't find a decent on-line map source.

Minnesota is finished. No more dots for me.

New Articles I've created

 * American Keuda - a fascinating new cat breed (actually not recognized yet)
 * Bass Islands - in Lake Erie, near Sandusky, Ohio
 * Bitrex - Denatonium - bitterest stuff known to date, needs work
 * Black 47 - the Irish-American rock group
 * Carbonation - replaced a redirect to 'carbon dioxide'
 * Carl Palmer - Atomic Rooster and Emerson, Lake and Palmer
 * Cat Fanciers' Association - world's largest cat registry
 * Clara Rockmore - Theremin virtuoso
 * Cleveland Torso Murderer - Cleveland's Jack the Ripper during the Depression
 * Continuous positive airway pressure - CPAP for short
 * Country Club Plaza - first auto-oriented shopping center, Kansas City, early 1920s
 * Downburst - microburst on a larger scale
 * Egyptian Mau - the essence of cat
 * Encore (Klaus Nomi album)
 * Fast neutron - faster than a thermal neutron
 * Forbidden Zone - bizarre 1980 cult film by Richard Elfman
 * Greg Lake - King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer
 * Haboob - baaad dust storms, I've been through several of these
 * Havana Brown
 * Hemotoxin - tissue-destroying toxin
 * Hind's Crimson Star - R Leporis, a very red variable star
 * Hope (album) - Klaatu's landmark second album
 * Jake - 1930s product adulteration incident (Jake leg, Jake walk)
 * Jalape&ntilde;o - not much, but it links to very good chili articles
 * Joey Bishop - early talk show host & Rat Pack member
 * John Louis Mansi - Smallhausen!
 * Klaus Nomi (album)
 * Linda Hunt - Academy Award winning actress and narrator
 * List of grape varieties - who doesn't like grapes in some form or another?
 * Markko Vineyards
 * Microburst - damaging straight line winds
 * Must - proto-wine
 * Niagara grape - foxy wine, but good when done well
 * Phenylthiocarbamide - the stuff that tastes bitter to some, tasteless to others
 * Phossy jaw - nasty occupational hazard of the 19th century
 * Rattlesnake - lovely creatures
 * Remote Control (album) - album by The Tubes
 * Riders in the Sky - America's Favorite Cowboy Band
 * Rita Dove - American poet laureate 1993 - 1995
 * Simple Man (album) - Klaus Nomi's second album
 * SL-1 - a 1961 lethal reactor accident, west of Idaho Falls
 * Spider Baby - great horror film from the early '60s
 * Stasis - that staple of good and bad sci-fi
 * Sue Grafton - popular author of the Kinsey Millhone detective series
 * Survival Research Laboratories - dangerous performance art
 * Susan Tyrrell - actress, lost both legs in 2000 to essential thrombocythemia
 * Teri Garr - actress, suffers from multiple sclerosis
 * Tetsuya Theodore Fujita - famous severe storms researcher
 * The Tubes (album) - album by The Tubes
 * Thomas Akers - astronaut - Hubble Space Telescope repairman and my 1975 Calc 3 instructor
 * Toni Basil - a rather versatile artist
 * Tonkinese cat
 * Triangle Fraternity - I'm an alumnus of the Missouri Mines chapter
 * USS Los Angeles (ZR-3) - the amazing acrobatic airship
 * Vaughn Monroe - famous singer
 * Vienna lager - eg Dos Equis
 * Viognier - grape variety
 * What Do You Want From Live - album by The Tubes
 * Wild leek - also known as ramps
 * ZMC-2 - perhaps the coolest airship ever to fly

Things I've improved significantly

 * Black Box (game)
 * Glazier-Higgins-Woodward tornadoes
 * Manx (cat) - I think I helped improve it
 * Tempranillo

My new article to-do list
If you see something you like on here, feel free to tackle it with my blessing.


 * Cleveland Clinic Disaster - May 15, 1929, 123 killed by fire and toxic fumes
 * Red Clay Ramblers - country/folk group
 * The Nomi Song - film about Klaus Nomi
 * Triclocarban - antibacterial

Articles I think I can improve

 * Adrian Belew - Twang Bar King, master guitarist, of King Crimson and The Bears
 * Al Stewart - historical musician
 * The Black Dahlia - 1947 LA murder victim
 * Capercaillie (band) - such a sad little stub for a great band
 * Colin Henry Wilson - great writer, needs at least a more complete list of his books
 * Dead Again - great, complex movie, article just a stub
 * Fear (band)
 * Greg Lake - maybe Keith Emerson and some more work on Carl Palmer, too
 * Louis Slotin - 1946 nuclear accident victim
 * Michael Keaton - He's Batman!
 * Prompt critical - nuclear engineering stuff
 * Purring - not much known, but maybe I can help
 * Randy California - late singer for Spirit
 * Rodger Young - American war hero of the past (and future)
 * Thujone - needs a better structural drawing at least
 * Urgh! A Music War - document the album and CD (as opposed to the movie)

Life-changing tips
... and if that doesn't work for you a little pomegranate molasses in lightly sweetened ice tea is good, too.

Images I've done Brian Rock