User:Jeltz the Poet

I adopted the pseudo Jeltz the Poet for no particular reason than that the otherwise odious character of the Vogon commander appearing in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (where Jeltz' ship carries out his assignment to vaporize the Earth to make way for a new hyperspace byway, a project that was canceled immediately afterward) appealed to me with his penchant for torturing captives by forcing them to endure his execrably bad poetry. I have been accused of torture by execrably bad prose.

I am a career criminal investigator who has also worked as a professional photographer, paramedic, firefighter, broadcaster, and university instructor (until being told to get on with acquiring a Ph.D. or hit the road). I have a particular interest in Texas history, and my first excursion into Wikipedia editing was to add material on the relationship between Texas pioneer Samuel Maverick to the referenced to term "maverick," referencing material from his wife's memoir.

If Wikipedia has particular value, I think one of them is the ability of an editor knowledgeable enough or interested enough to contribute oddments of information that may be otherwise lost or ignored. I offer an example.

The Wikipedia entry on [Color Photography] does an admirable job of covering the ground. Because of materials left behind by a deceased relative, I was aware of a process (if we can call it that) attempted and supposedly demonstrated in the 1940's by a gentleman who reasoned that chromatic aberration common in the lenses of the day actually recorded colors on black and white film, because light of different wave lengths focused sharply at different depths of the emulsion. He published accounts of his technique of using a special filter of concentric color rings through which the image could be could be projected to produce an image with colors corresponding to the original scene. It may or may not have actually worked or at least appeared to work.

So far as I can find, the demonstration is referenced on only one web site, that of Time magazine (which happily has posted their old articles), and would, but for that one reference, appear nowhere but in the rather hard to find copies of one or two photo magazines of the day. I will, when I can find one of those old issues, add that reference to the Wikipedia page. A small thing, but illustrative of how easily odd bits of knowledge can be lost.

And contributing to Wikipedia does little to aggravate global warming and is fat-free and sugar-free and is quite as good a waste of time as anything could be.