User:Double sharp

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    Lurker since 2006, editor since 2009. I tend to oscillate somewhat between these states.

    Babel following definitions of Wikipedia:Babel/Levels. They reflect my ability for reading/listening rather than writing/speaking, because I learnt most of them through reading texts. (Quite understandably in the case of Latin, mostly from figuring out Gauss.) When it comes to writing, it is only accurate if you allow me a dictionary. :) Additionally, they vary more or less by one level depending on how long it has been since I've last used them. But still, I mostly edit English WP, because it is the most spoken language after all (even Chinese is only second). And yes, mutual intelligibility and some avocational interest in linguistics means that I could claim to have limited reading knowledge in more related languages (NB Vovin's comment about how a Russian speaker and linguist can read any Slavic language except Czech), but I stuck to those I actually looked into specifically!

    I have edited significantly on inorganic chemistry, Solar System astronomy, geometry, classical music, and chess (including variants; among regional variants, mostly the historical shogi variants). In no particular order.

    My favourite star is Spica. (Present company excepted, naturally.) With the analogous caveat, my favourite planets are Mercury and Venus. We have so few rocky planetary bodies to study, and I'd like to know more about Earth's siblings! At least for Luna and Mars we've had many more missions. (I mostly think of "planet" geophysically, so Luna, Io, and Europa are another three rocky planets.) Also, I feel like they are now often unfairly overlooked in the popular imagination in favour of the planets further out. Really, I'd rather live on Mercury or Venus than Mars if we start talking about futurism (though I still wouldn't chance it on Io). :) Since I think of "planet" geophysically, for me the lower limit is collapse of most porosity to form a solid, round body, and the upper limit is the onset of hydrogen burning and becoming a red dwarf: for me, brown dwarfs are just high-mass planets (most of them would've stopped fusing deuterium by now, anyway).

    Rather sympathetic to V=L, in the sense that the constructible universe is the (abstract, set-theoretic) universe that I think of as a default, similarly to the usual status of AC among mathematicians. This does not mean I reject universes where V=L is false, or universes where AC is false; they just do not conform to my "intuitive" picture of sets. But they are still really interesting!

    Actually, my opinion about infinity is similar to Stefan H. Reiterer's response to Doron Zeilberger's opinion 160. I don't think infinity has any existence in the real Universe, neither do I think large finite numbers do, but they sure are useful abstractions. Long may they live as such.

    Also a believer in P=NP. See this Don Knuth interview for why (it's question 17).

    1.e4 is best by test, Fischer was right about that. That said, 1.d4 and 1.Nf3 are almost as good. And if you're not a GM, just about anything sensible will be fine. (I probably play the Alekhine too often for my own good!) The fact that computers play much better chess than we do does not stop us from having fun. We wouldn't have victories and defeats without mistakes.

    The correct version of the periodic table, insofar as there is one for a model (so let's say: the consistent version), has helium in group 2. You can have it as Charles Janet's form (below), or keep the s-block at the left end just like usual (because quantum effects lower s orbital energies and so the big energy gap happens before them), but either way 1s2 overrides chemical properties. :) As Eric Scerri has pointed out, the periodic table classifies abstract elements (atoms with their electronic structure) that are preserved across chemical conditions, not elements as simple substances that are not: salt contains sodium and chlorine the atoms, and their overlapping orbitals, but it doesn't contain sodium the reactive metal and chlorine the toxic gas. Otherwise, it would be difficult to understand why nitrogen and bismuth are in the same group. Actually this reassignment is starting to get more and more serious consideration these days, but it goes without saying that I do not support changing our default periodic table format on Wikipedia just yet. For me, an element is philosophically a type of atom (as distinguished by Z) with a characteristic set of valence electrons and orbitals when engaging in bonding interactions with other kinds of atom. Yes, the classification into blocks ignores relativity, but it doesn't matter too much. It will probably matter for period 8, but that is still theoretical and more calculations in that area would be helpful.

    With analogous caveats about what's actually necessary for life, I vote for mercury as a favourite metal, and fluorine as a favourite nonmetal. I think the superheavies exist, but not quite in the same way that tungsten or even plutonium exists. Their existence is mostly potential rather than actual, with the exception that we can turn it into reality briefly in the relevant facilities. Of course there is a continuum as half-lives decrease, not to mention other factors: I think francium exists more than dubnium does.

    My favourite composer is Franz Schubert. Though many of the usual suspects are indeed not far behind. I'd also mention Charles-Valentin Alkan as a perhaps not-too-well-known name who is also on my list of favourites. :)

    Fixed do is pointless in English (and German, and other languages that use letter names). We already have an absolute system for note names: they're just letters. "Do" should always be the local tonic, whether major, minor, or whatever other mode. So the minor scale is do-re-me-fa-so-le-ti-do. The major scale is fundamental, and the parallel minor scale comes as an alteration of it. Also, the really "natural" minor scale is the harmonic minor. (The tonic must be minor; the dominant must be major to be functional; so we need a minor subdominant to keep the minor chords in the majority in the most important three.) The variable degrees (6th, 7th, Neapolitan 2nd) arise as chromatic alterations to avoid awkwardness in the circle of fifths, because here the diminished fifth is so much closer to the tonic. For this reason, movable do with la-based minor is the one thing I would admit is worse than fixed do, because it doesn't make sense: it is not consistent about making "do" the tonic, which was the entire point of movable do. And I say this while having perfect pitch (albeit with the ability to switch to thinking in functions, read transposed scores, and reset A to 415 Hz if needed).

    For languages that already use the sol-fa note names as the absolute names of the notes, I guess scale degree numbers are the best option I can think of, though syllable count might be an issue. For atonal music, singing the German note names isn't a bad option: as long as you stay in single-sharp or single-flat territory (which atonal music really should anyway), they are all monosyllabic.

    I wish my heroes George Gamow and Lev Landau had gotten elements, like Einstein and Fermi did. Okay, actually I have many other heroes as well across fields, e.g. Li Shanlan, Yuen-ren Chao, David Bronstein, E. T. A. Hoffmann, ... But Gamow and Landau are my physicist heroes. :)

    Wikipedia-logo-v2-en.svgThis user is one of the 900 most active English Wikipedians of all time.
    Noia 64 apps karm.svg This user has been on Wikipedia for 13 years, 9 months and 21 days.
    Left-step periodic table (by Charles Janet)
    f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f6 f7 f8 f9 f10 f11 f12 f13 f14 d1 d2 d3 d4 d5 d6 d7 d8 d9 d10 p1 p2 p3 p4 p5 p6 s1 s2
    1s H He
    2s Li Be
    2p 3s B C N O F Ne Na Mg
    3p 4s Al Si P S Cl Ar K Ca
    3d 4p 5s Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Co Ni Cu Zn Ga Ge As Se Br Kr Rb Sr
    4d 5p 6s Y Zr Nb Mo Tc Ru Rh Pd Ag Cd In Sn Sb Te  I  Xe Cs Ba
    4f 5d 6p 7s La Ce Pr Nd Pm Sm Eu Gd Tb Dy Ho Er Tm Yb Lu Hf Ta W Re Os Ir Pt Au Hg Tl Pb Bi Po At Rn Fr Ra
    5f 6d 7p 8s Ac Th Pa U Np Pu Am Cm Bk Cf Es Fm Md No Lr Rf Db Sg Bh Hs Mt Ds Rg Cn Nh Fl Mc Lv Ts Og 119 120
    f-block d-block p-block s-block
    This form of periodic table is congruent with the order in which electron shells are ideally filled according to the Madelung rule, as shown in the accompanying sequence in the left margin (read from top to bottom, left to right). The experimentally determined ground-state electron configurations of the elements differ from the configurations predicted by the Madelung rule in twenty instances, but the Madelung-predicted configurations are always at least close to the ground state. The last two elements shown, elements 119 and 120, have not yet been synthesized.
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