User:Ilmari Karonen

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Quote of the day / week / month / year / whatever:
 * "Finding out that pine cones are Frenchmen in clever disguise would revolutionize our understanding of biology, physics, pretty much everything. It would be a stunning discovery of astonishing impact. This doesn't mean it is an open problem whether pine cones are Frenchmen in clever disguise or that it would make sense to attempt to show they are."  &mdash; Aatu Koskensilta in sci.math

About myself
I am, as of this writing, an undergraduate mathematics student living in Helsinki, Finland. I am currently working on my MSc thesis on the cluster approximations of cellular automaton models in mathematical biology. I have been an active poster on Usenet since 1996, and (occasionally) maintain a personal web site (see below). My past and current interests include, in no particular order:


 * Core War
 * ASCII Art
 * Programming, especially Perl
 * Mathematics, including:
 * Discrete mathematics and number theory
 * Cellular automata
 * Game theory, including evolutionary game theory
 * Markov models
 * Bayesian inference
 * Photography
 * Image processing and rendering
 * Graphic design and desktop publishing
 * Environmentalism

I have contributed to a number of articles as IP 85.76.76.123 prior to registering this account.

Articles I've started
This is a list of new articles I've added to Wikipedia. Feel free to improve them!


 * Second order cellular automaton, Block cellular automaton: My first new articles. They started off as additions to cellular automaton, but that article is already so long that I decided to split them off.
 * Darwin (programming game): A predecessor of Core War. Earlier versions incorrectly identified the two games.  I corrected the claim, and created a separate article for the original game.
 * Base 36: Someone decided to name this numeral system after himself and create a vanity article about it. I caught it on Special:Newpages, nominated it for deletion and, since no proper article existed on the subject, decided to start one.
 * Dental drill: I wanted to link to this article from the reference desk but discovered that it didn't exist. I decided it was easier to start it myself than to request that someone else do it.
 * Electronic Frontier Finland: Finnish on-line civil rights organization. I'm a member, I figured the least I could do was start a stub for them.
 * van der Corput sequence: A low-discrepancy sequence over the unit interval.
 * Eurasian Least Shrew: The second-smallest mammal in the world after the Etruscan Pygmy Shrew.
 * Wolfram code: A brief explanation of this rather opaque way of numbering cellular automaton rules.
 * Advice to AOL users: So you're an AOL user and you've just found yourself blocked from editing. What to do?
 * Fisher-Yates shuffle: A popular and efficient shuffling algorithm that dates back to 1938.
 * Bagheera kiplingi: The only (mostly) herbivorous spider known so far. (With thanks to Sarefo for [ turning] my awkward stub into a real article.)

Articles I've worked on

 * Core War: Rewrote about half of the article. Still need to complete the job.  Also recently started work on Redcode.
 * False morel: This article was a mess after multiple editors had added contradictory claims seemingly at random positions. I rewrote it and gyromitrin almost completely, trying to put the important part (don't eat them raw!) first.
 * Siberian Flying Squirrel: Translated from Finnish. Could use more references.

Article rescue
These are some articles I've spotted during new pages patrol or found on CAT:CSD and cleaned up and/or wikified. The diffs include my original improvements; often others have since picked up from where I left.


 * Human rights in Finland (diff)
 * Kelimutu (diff)
 * Hilda and Zelda (diff)
 * The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (diff)
 * Bhoral (diff)
 * Jack Churchill (diff)
 * George Baerveldt (diff)
 * Ezra Fitch (diff)
 * Kenneth Molloy (diff)
 * Licking (diff, rescued from AfD)
 * North Oconee High School (diff)
 * In The Clear (diff)

Images
See User:Ilmari Karonen/Image gallery.

Templates

 * Template:Familytree: A template for creating simple HTML/CSS family trees using an ASCII art -like syntax.
 * Template:Stars: A twisted little template for displaying star ratings in album infoboxes.

User scripts
''Here are some user scripts I've written. See User:Ilmari Karonen/scripts for the full list, including obsolete and broken scripts.''

To do
This is my personal shopping list of articles that are either missing or in need of improvement. By listing them here, I hopefully won't forget them so easily.


 * Netpbm needs expansion and redirects from the tool names listed at http://netpbm.sourceforge.net/doc/directory.html.
 * Should take a closer look at Redcode and Core War to see if they still need expansion.
 * Cellular automaton is a rambling mess, a lot of it could be split into subarticles

Missing diagrams:
 * see also: Category:Wikipedia articles with ASCII art

MediaWiki improvements:
 * see my user page on mediawiki.org