User:Cephas Atheos

A bit about Cephas Q Atheos

I'm an almost-retired electronics engineer with a huge range of interests and skills.

I have a severe spinal disability, hence my semi-retired status. However, this hasn't affected my learning abilities, and it gives me an enormous amount of free time, so it's a win/win as far as my intelligence is concerned.

My primary interests and skills, apart from music and writing, are physics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, practical mechanics, biblical exegesis, history, medicine (particularly neuroanatomy and neurochemistry, for obvious reasons!), geology, archaeology, and of course I love dinosaurs!

I've lately come to enjoy mathematics, but I had a very hard time learning the basics as a child, so while I can integrate, differentiate, and take logarithms, it really taxes my mind terribly and my brain hurts, so I have to stop. I've re-read Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality over 12 times, but I can't seem to get past about page 60. It just stops making sense, you see. So, while I absolutely appreciate the astonishing beauty of maths, such as symmetries, polynomials, and the Fourier Transform (which I use every day in my work restoring audio recordings for people), I can't transform or really intuitively grasp reference frames and Minkowski or Riemann spaces. It's my one worst failing, since I have to work so much harder to keep up with the latest physics and astronomy.

However... I guess as compensation for my dreadful grasp of maths, my reading, grammar, and comprehension skills are quite extraordinary. For example, with a minimum sustained reading speed of more than 900 words per minute, I read more quickly than 99.9999% of the educated adult population - that means only one adult in 1,000,000 can even potentially read as quickly, and they don't have nearly the same vocabulary or grammatical expertise that I've painstakingly built up over the past 45 years. That makes me really keen to get involved here and contribute in every way I can - just as long as it's not maths!

That said, I'm really keen to continue contributing to WP (previously I was Cephas Borg, a reference to the spinal hardware, intrathecal pump, and neural stimulator I rely on in order to walk and sit up), and I know I have much still to learn. What a great feeling, to have such interests and knowledge and reading ability, and to be permitted to work in such a great community of like-minded people! The learning possibilities are endless!

Thanks for reading, and I hope to meet you in the various talk pages around. If you see me there, feel free to say "G'day!"...

Cheers, Cephas Atheos (talk) 00:08, 5 November 2012 (UTC)