Greetings! edit

Hi! I'm a new Wikipedian, and now that I've finally created an account, I'm slowly working though my long list of cleanup / enhancement edits that I've saved as bookmarks over the years. About 80% of the older ones have already been taken care of while I avoided this rabbit hole, which is great!

My educational background is in computer science and neuroscience, and I've done a fair bit of teaching and tutoring, primarily in mathematics and the sciences. I currently work as a software engineer at a startup and volunteer in the same capacity for a nonprofit. As is usual in the field, I have worked with many programming languages professionally; I have restricted my language-level userboxes to those that I currently employ on a day-to-day basis.

The handle Curunauth is a Sindarin name I created over a decade ago after discarding several initial attempts that produced Google results. Naturally, within roughly a month of my adoption of this unique handle, someone else independently generated it as the name of an NPC in a Lord of the Rings-themed RPG on a message board. C'est la vie. It employs the roots curu (craft/skill), nauth (thought), and tân (smith, back-derived from mírdan (jewelsmith)); "nauthan" is my attempt at a term for programmer, and I built that into a name similar to Curunír (used to refer to wizards in general as well as Saruman in particular). That connection of programming to wizardry was inspired by a Paul Rothemund's TED talk "Casting spells with DNA" - just as DNA comprises "words" that create physical objects when "read", thoughts expressed in computer code come alive and affect the world.

Favorite References edit

Hiswelókë's Sindarin dictionary by Didier Willis -- the etymological notes in particular are quite useful when trying to invent terms for things that don't exist in the language's original universe :-)