User:Nixdorf



My full name is Jörgen Nixdorf, born 1948 (like Alice Cooper and Ozzy Osbourne, go figure). I only do Wikipedia on my computer, you can think of this as my homepage. I used to work more on Susning.nu, then, following its closing on the Swedish Wikipedia but the large community and high quality focus of the English Wikipedia drew me here, so this is where I spend most of my time. I've been editing English Wikipedia articles since November 2002.

I am a Swedish catholic christian, though one of very troubled religious nature, that's why you will find me working a lot on pages like Gnosticism. Further I consider myself a liberal. Apart from that I'm a retired programmer, I used to spend a lot of time programming COBOL. Though I believe most people think of me as a rigid, narrow-minded, middle-class intellectual dry old engineer, I have been known to have a sense of humour.

I only use Linux though out of convenience, I know many people like Microsoft Windows but the Redmond product is too hard for me to understand. Linux is quite easy. I'm too old.

Wikipedia problems

 * Verifiability is a big problem, i.e. know that the facts stated in articles are correct. There has been a lot of discussions on this issue, no real good solution in sight. Perhaps to freeze professionally peer-reviewed content so one knows that atleast that version is fairly accurate. Very hard.
 * Authors of "real" encyclopedias like to use pompous language: "the finest thinker of his time", "the best ..." and such value-charged authoritative statements. Wikipedia tries to avoid it, but that makes for quite boring reading without any commonplace opinions on the facts presented. The problem is: how do you define a commonplace opinion? Certainly, this used to be the opinion of people writing encyclopedias. It is definately not a democratic value: the idea of the populace is not founded in fact and often influenced by myth. So how do you avoid academic elitism, and flat prose produced using a lowest common denominator of value-free statements at the same time when writing articles? Very very hard.

Places of interest

 * My enemies: zealots, cranks, apologetes, proselytism, meatpuppets...
 * Gebrochene Grotesk should really be translated to the English wikipedia.
 * No original research
 * Neutral point of view
 * Verifiability
 * Manual of Style
 * Image markup
 * Style and How-to Directory
 * Naming conventions
 * Categorization
 * Image pages
 * Wikipedia talk:Swedish Wikipedians' notice board

Interesting stuff

 * Technology:
 * Linux
 * Universal Serial Bus
 * Tuple space
 * Blackboard system
 * Culture and religion:
 * Ergodic literature - like Umberto Eco, Thomas Pynchon
 * Laudate Dominum
 * Emerald Tablet
 * Popular culture:
 * Amen break
 * Wilhelm scream
 * History and Archeaology:
 * Gnosticism
 * Twelve Tables
 * Göbekli Tepe - world's oldest archaeological site
 * Psychology:
 * Fundamental attribution error
 * Gell-Mann amnesia effect
 * Negativity bias vs Optimism bias
 * Locus of control
 * Halo effect
 * Rosy retrospection
 * Dunbar's number

Interesting people

 * Giovanni Battista Piranesi
 * Igor Panarin

Interesting hypotheses

 * Linguistic relativity
 * Dunning–Kruger effect

Funny stuff

 * Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge
 * Erdős–Bacon number
 * Voynich manuscript
 * Complaint tablet to Ea-nasir
 * Did you notice that parts of Teresa Brewers Music! Music! Music! is suspiciously similar to a passage of Franz Liszts Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?

Intuition
Things intuitive:
 * I belive that the track Blind of Hercules and Love Affair's self-entitled album alludes to the story in the Hymn of the Pearl, as do (more obviously) Astrid Lindgrens Mio, My Son, is this what we could call a Gnostic metanarrative?
 * Hard to tell which of Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Yann Tiersen makes the most depressing piano scores.

Actually getting answers
Wikipedia is good for getting answers if you already know the exact question in very exact and specific terms. If you want to ask the question in a more natural way, Quora is recently a good platform for this. For example I noticed that the question on Quora posed like this:


 * What do you call a person that won't assume any responsibility for things gone wrong in their life?

Yielded an excellent answer referring to locus of control.

Work done
Fun things I've done: one of my friends is a collector of books and owns an original copy of Libri tres de occulta philosophia by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa in the printing from 1533. I photographed and scanned some images from this book to the entry for pentagram. Very beautiful images.

I also like drawing figures in Dia and adding to Wikipedia entries.


 * Fifth generation computer systems project is being supplied with an image. The webpage states that materials are in the public domain, but still I work to get a clear permission to use it.

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

sv:Användare:Nixdorf