MichaelCrawford

Waving My Flags

This user is a citizen of the United States of America.

This user was born and lives in the U.S. State of Washington.

Just Because I'm Paranoid It Doesn't Mean That Jimmy Wales Isn't Out to Get Me

Puzzling, wouldn't you agree, that for two or three years now I've been able to edit anything I Damn well pleased despite not being logged in.

Back in the day I somehow managed to space my password while at the same time losing my password-reset email domain as a result of having been tossed into the slammer and held on $50,000.00 Bail for making Felony Terrorist Threats when I mentioned to a Grover Beach, California Police Officer that if I did not bookmark the results of my extensive online literature research into the effect of software defects on aviation safety, I might not be able to prevent a Malaysian passenger jet's autopilot from leading three or four hundred passengers to be completely overcome with despair and the very worst kind of inconsolable grief when their craft runs out of JP-4 thereby enabling them all to Hang with Elvis in Davy Jones' Locker.

Late last night, right around Midnight Socialist Coast Time, for the very first time EVAR I was informed that I could not post my latest edit to my talk page because I wasn't logged in.

Further, I found my IP had just got banned, so I couldn't edit _anything_ anymore.

So I walked over to a different WiFi spot, registered for a new account, then attempted yet strictly speaking failed to post my User Talk update.

Not to be outdone, I went to yet another, then launched Linux Mint 16 in a VirtualBox VM so my User Agent would be completely different, posted a few quite reasonable, on-topic and authoritative edits, then again attempted to post my status update, once more to find myself banninated.

I figured I would do well to hijack the credentials of a close friend and colleague so I 0-dayed Wikipedia by logging right into _his_ account rather than any of my own.

To be clear: I did not use his password.

Instead I logged right into my friend's account with No Password Of Any Sort.

I could edit anything, but the very instant I updated my own status I found my IP got banned, further that it stayed banned so I could not edit anything at all.

I have been an actively contributing editor for over ten years. I even attended last year's Portland, Oregon WicNic.

So why oh why can I post every edit of my heart's desire to any article I happen upon as I go about my day yet cannot post my latest status to MY OWN TALK PAGE?

Michael David Crawford

P.S. Extra credit if you can clue me in as to how to reset my password without paying some cybersquatter his, uh, "asking price" of USD $3,600.00 to ransom my own domain.

You obviously could post to this talk page, so the issue seems resolved. The rest of your questions doesn't seem related to Wikipedia. Huon (talk) 22:34, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

My Burden of Sorrow

Later tonight I'll mark the following piece up in XHTML then repost it my personal site, where sometime later I will expand upon many of these topics at length.

The Tritium - Nuclear Isotope Hydrogen-3, consisting of an Electron and a Nucleus with two Neutrons in addition to Hydrogen-1's single Proton - in Hydrogen Bombs must be regularly replenished as it has a Half Life of but twelve years.

While Tritium is produced in Nature through the Radioactive Decay of many different Isotopes, it is available on Earth only in very small quantities, as of course it has that very short Half Life, and other oxidizes to form water vapor or, being of very little mass, eventually escaping the Earth's atmosphere completely by flying off into [[Outer Space||. Helium is actually produced with far greater abundance through the decay of radioactive elements found throughout the planet, but because Helium - with a certain very rare exception that I'll have to Google up for you later - does not form chemical bonds with anything, despite Monatomic Helium being heavier than Diatomic Hydrogen, far more He escapes into Space than does Hydrogen.

It is for that specific reason - yes I understand I need a citation, but I myself am a Radiation Physicist, so I'll turn up the needed citation Real Soon Now to add to the article itself - that Hydrogen Bombs were tested so often by most members of the "Nuclear Club" throughout the Cold War. It's not that we didn't know how long the Tritium would remain explosive, but that most of our weapons designs were quite sophisticated so as to facilitate what the Scientific, Military and Disarmament Communites cheerfully refer to as "Delivery".

The problem with Delivery is that the straighforward designs for all three different types of nuclear weapon - the Uranium Assembly Bomb, the Plutonium Implosion Bomb as well as the Two-Stage Plutonium Implosion Hydrogen Bomb are very large, very heavy and so not amenable to being, uh, "Delivered" to their waiting, uh, "Recipient" with much chance at all of the Recipient being quite overcome with Joy that their beloved friends, family, classmates and colleagues were so incredibly thoughtful as to throw them a Surprise Party for their Birthday.

Have a look at the Unclassified photos of any Bombs in use today. Every last one of them is very, very small, even the H-Bombs. The need to replenish the Tritium is far more important than you would at first expect, because for most of those designs, it is not at all obvious ahead of time whether the Bomb will actually detonate upon Delivery, produce a Subcritical Reaction known to the Weapons Community as a Squib Explosion, or fail entirely to go off at all.

But it just wouldn't work to actually produce the Tritium close to the actual locations of the Bombs that are awaiting orders to attack. That's because we have so many Bombs, each of which requires so much Tritium - Deuterium as well - that one requires a whole bunch of Nuclear Reactors to have any hope of obtaining enough of the stuff.

The other problem is that, the designs of the Bombs now being so subtle, sophisticated, arcane and delicate, all manner of expensive, precision and highly Classified facilities are required to actually perform the refueling of the Bombs. So in reality, when it comes time to Juice your Rechargeable Battery back up, it's either flown, or transported by truck or rail to the Pantex Plant in Texas, it's Hydrogen explosive completely removed, then immediately replaced with fresh Explosive that is prepared ahead of time for just such an event, then the Bomb is shipped back to That From Whence It Came.

Have a look at the photos of Fat Man and Little Boy. One was a Uranium Assembly Bomb, the other was a Plutonium Implosion Bomb. Both Bombs were so big and heavy that the very largest Bomber possessed by the United States Army Air Corps could only tote one of each, with the elite pilots who sat out the vast majority of the Second World War never, ever being given the least clue as to why they devoted all the years of WWII to training missions in which they dropped very large, very heavy weights out of the [[Bomb bay]bomb bays]] of their B-29 Superfortresses, then more or less on their own to having figure out a way to Split the Scene Completely.

Let's just say that those two or three dozen Cessna Pilots, while never obtaining any manner of detailed understanding, did at least manage clue in to what was planned not for Hiroshima nor for Nagasaki, but downtown Berlin. It's just that we managed to defeat the National Socialist Worker's Party in a purely conventional way before the Manhattan Project's Magic Elixir was quite done cooking.

The bombs dropped on Japan each had a Yield of ten or fifteen Kilotons - that is, they produced a blast about as powerful as ten or fifteen tons of TNT. TNT works and is actually chemically synthesized just like Nitroglycerin, but is far safer to manufacture, store and handle, because it is a Solid at room temperature rather than a Liquid as Nitroglycerin is, as well as occupying quite a deep Thermodynamic Potential Well, thereby requiring a Detonator to get it to go off:

Pop Quiz

What do Ortho Snail and Slug Death, any flavor of Kool-Ade mix other than Lemon, Hydrogen Peroxide, a mixing bowl, a bag of ice, table salt, a water glass, a Tea Spoon, a Colander or Spaghetti Strainer, and what I figured at first would be just one but in reality turns out to be two coffee filters have in common?

On of all mornings, New Years Eve of 2011 - just over six months ago as I write this - I rang up the Portland, Oregon office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. When the poor bastard who had to work over the holiday just in case 9/11 happened all over again that very night, answered the phone, I quickly surmised that he had not done well in grade school when I asked him that very same question.

But he grew very calm and paid rapt attention when I explained the solution to the problem I had just posed, then quietly said to me:

But what can just one person do?

Lay that information into the hands of someone who is in a postion to do something about it.

... I just as quietly replied.

Let's just say that I will take to my grave my advice as to what the FBI ought to do about any flavor of Kool-Ade Mix other then Lemon.

MichaelCrawford 50.131.200.103 (talk) 05:20, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

Who Do I Have To Blow Around Here To Be Considered Notable Enough For A Wikipedia Article?

So, I've reviewed the issue and discussed it with some other editors and it appears that establishing notability would be a stretch. It is entirely possible that an article couldn't be created that would be approved in deletion review. In addition, we feel it might be better for you not to have that information and the information in this discussion to remain online. Once you have read this, or in a couple of days, I will request oversight to remove this information from the history. Ryan Vesey Review me! 20:04, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

No Worries.

While I am disappointed, I really am quite gratified that you took my request seriously and went to all the trouble you did on my behalf.

It's not quite ready for public consumption yet, but I'm working on an essay that might have some hope of establishing the required notability. Again it is self-published on the Web for the specific reason that it is against my most fundamental values to require anyone to pay money, or even have to go to any real effort benefit from my hard-won experience.

To the extent that my work ever has been or ever will be cited by others, it's because other web publishers link to it from their own sites. It would not be hard to look over what some of them say about my work to come up with enough evidence for notability.

What really upset me was that a few months ago, I stumbled across a poet who has quite a detailed Wikipedia article, despite having published but two books of poetry. Frankly I have no clue how much work I've published online, but there are mountains of it, with my first publications being in print form as a school newspaper columnist and movie reviewer for the student newspaper at Fairfield, California's Armijo High School in 1981.

It's just after five Monday morning as I write this; I started work on the following piece around eleven yesterday morning - Sunday - and sat up all day, through the night until the approach of the morning twilight to compose this piece. My intention was at first to post it to a developer list, but now I see that it has some real potential to make a positive difference to the community, so rather than mailing it to a list, or widely broadcasting its link to the developer community, I'm going to put some time into developing it, not so much that I get cited widely enough to earn a spot at Wikipedia, but to contribute to the solution of what I regard as some of the very worst problems facing Humanity today:

• HOWTO Write Code That Doesn't Suck

It chiefly concerns the point that naive implementations of even quite sophisticated, well-researched and time-tested Algorithms suffer quite serious performance degradations as a result of the efforts that hardware engineers expend to make software run faster.

Consider that the L1 Code and Data Caches in today's microprocessors are of very limited size, typically 32 kB apiece. One of the very best ways to accelerate a computation that has a strictly limited range of outputs as well as a strictly limited range of inputs is to use a Lookup Table - or Precomputed Table - which stores the results of the computations for all possible inputs. One then concatenates the bits of all the inputs to make an index into the table, thereby transforming what would otherwise may have been an expensive, perhaps poorly-scaling computation into a Constant Time memory dereference, that is, an O(1) Algorithm.

Unfortunately if the total table size is substantialy larger than the L1 Cache, with each of the possible output values being much smaller than a Cache Line - typically 32 or 64 Bytes - typical access patterns will randomly thrash your cache, resulting in performance that is quite a lot slower than if one configured the Hardware Memory Management Unit to disable caching for that range of memory entirely.

Operating system kernels typically support non-cacheable physically resident - not paged out - memory regions for use in physical device I/O. But what I have been advocating since I was a Senior Engineer at Apple Computer in 1995, is that operating systems should provide support for disabling the cache in regions of userspace virtual memory, while at the same time enabling those same memory regions to be paged in and out.

I broadcast this idea around an internal discussion board at Apple while I was there. Immediately I received a response from someone who was working on Chinese speech software - I don't recall anymore whether it was Speech Synthesis or Speech Recognition - who pointed out that his own Algorithm required a three hundred kilobyte table, each of whose elements was just one byte.

Apple's more-powerful CPU at the time was the PowerPC 604 - not the 604e. The 604 had but 512 32-Byte Data Cache lines, for a total of sixteen kilobytes. Reading in just one byte of that Chinese Speech Lookup table would blow away one of those 512 Cache Lines, dropping 32 Bytes on the floor, all for the purpose of reading just one byte!

I've been researching this area quite intensively since I invented what I refer to only as The Holy Grail late on the night of July 27, 2006, in my home office in Truro, Nova Scotia. I've never told anyone anything about it other than that it is a certain kind of file format that is a vast improvement over existing formats, and that competing Algorithms for consuming and producing those files have been in common use for as long as computers have existed.

I will at least drop the oblique hint that I expect Alan Turing himself came up with the first software implementation, but the Algorithm in a more general sense does not require any manner of eectronic device.

I am now quite close to bringing my very first implementation of The Holy Grail to market. While I do hope to make a few bucks off my invention, I realized around January of this year that of far greater significance to Humanity is that my Algorithm primarily concerns Efficiency, and that while not always the case, the computers that execute more-efficient Computer Programs consume less Electric Power than do the computers that execute less-efficient code.

Disk drives are able to spin down more often, the CPU executes the HLT instruction more often, stays halted longer, the other circuitry spends more time in low-power states because the more-efficient code gets the same job done in less time. One may also be able to perform the computation with less-capable hardware, that has slower, cheaper, cooler CPUs, less memory, as well as smaller and less rapidly rotating hard drives.

It's going to take me several years to elucidate the results of six years of research, but I recently published the very first page of it:

• HOWTO Write Software That Uses Less Electric Power

So far that essay only discusses the importance of compact code and data, with efficient access patterns that maximize cache utilitization. It's not yet at all obvious what is plainly apparent to me, that I fully expect that if my recommendations were widely - but not necessarily universally - implemented, all of the world's server data centers put together would reduce their total Electric Power consumption by a factor of at least a thousand.

Consider that Google all by itself consumes enough juice to light up a good size city, then multiply that by Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, SoSo, Seznam, the Apple Store, AOL, Facebook, all the music and video streaming services.

If embedded and mobile device software developers took my advice to heart, our portable computers and consumer electronics could use smaller, cheaper batteries that would retain their charges for a longer time, and require less frequent and so much less expensive battery replacement. Portables and embedded systems could all be smaller and lighter. It would be cheaper to put spacecraft in orbit, or even to send space probes off to visit the other planets.

Again it's not obvious what I'm actually getting at from that very first quite minimal introduction. What I've been working on since yesterday morning goes into quite a lot more detail, as well as discussing the basic Physics behind it.

Note that my degree is in Physics, not Computer Science, and that the only Computer Science course I ever took in my entire life was taught by an Electrical Engineering Professior and VLSI researcher by the name of Carver Meade, at Pasadena's California Institute of Technology in the Spring Quarter of 1982. He devoted our entire first lecture to considering the various motions of electrons in doped Silicon Crystals. At the end of the eleven week quarter, we had all written quite robust and full featured tablet and pen-driven vector graphic editors in Pascal.

Think about it: eleven weeks from an Electron wandering around a crystalline lattice, to shipping Color MacDraw in 1982 on a six megahertz engineering workstation.

Contemplating all that the last little while eventually yielded the insight I required to commence - but not yet to complete - writing my essay.

I refer to it as an essay rather than an article or paper because, while it does inform, my real aim in writing it is to convince. The methods for writing highly-efficient, Damn near provable bug-free software have been largely a Solved Problem since the 1960s, but Kids These Days don't like to hang out in University Libraries. Instead the prefer to repeat the same mistakes their elders did without even bothering to publish the results of their research. Thus my aim isn't really to inform anyone of anything other than the importance of heeding the lessons of those who have gone before us.

Again, I am truly grateful for your kind help in this matter. - MichaelCrawford 50.131.200.103 (talk) 13:16, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Please note that you should not post your phone number or email address on Wikipedia. It is very public and the information would be available to everyone. I have removed it and requested that it be deleted from the history. Ryan Vesey Review me! 13:32, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Ryan Vesey, while I am grateful that you are so considerate of my privacy, a child of but three years old could turn up in mere seconds not just my direct phone number and email, but my postal address as well by dropping my name into any Search engine:

Because I am Self-Employed, of crucial importance to my very survival is that potential clients are able to reach me any where, at any time, through any means they care to contact me through. Thus every last page at my company's website bears a prominent Contact link on the right just below my logo, with the footer of every page spelling out explicitly my email, phone number and postal address, with most of the pages within that site providing my phone and mail right under my Byline.

I have actually gone so far as to configure Apache Server-Side Includes for each of those items, as well as a couple "nested" includes that switches to a different Cascading Stylesheet when one views my site on a small screen such as an iPhone or Android Phone. My "Mobile Site" isn't quite yet where it needs to be, but quite likely late TONIGHT, right at the top of every page of my Mobile Site there will also appear my mail and phone.

For reasons I'll go into later, someone else was eventually able to dig up my physical home address as well. As a result of that, I stopped guarding my street address as carefully as I once did. While I don't blast it all over Creation as I do my other contact info, no more than three or four minutes would turn up where I live as well.

Get This:

Nobody ever calls me.

I think I am going to cry now. - MichaelCrawford 50.131.200.103 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 05:04, 11 July 2012 (UTC)

The Wikipedia Cabal refuses to consider you notable because all of the page meisters are satanic skeptics and followers of The Amazi Randi and Dr. Richard Dawkins who believe that there is no credible evidence for your existence any more than there is for this guy named God. Despite that CNN Interview, CBC Radio interview, and tons of third party links on you to reputable sites. They conspire to make you non-notable like that Brian Peppers guy who is the son of Jimbo Whales. Rusty Foster has almost no third party websites talking about him, but he gets an article because he is a member of the cabal. Eris Blastar (talk) 04:57, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Fr517 P507

Welcome!

Hello, MichaelCrawford, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

• The five pillars of Wikipedia
• How to edit a page
• Help pages
• Tutorial
• How to write a great article
• Manual of Style

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or place {{helpme}} on your talk page and someone will show up shortly to answer your questions. Again, welcome!  -- GraemeL ^(talk) 15:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Nice to see somebody showing up and taking the responsible path to adding external links instead of slapping them across a dozen or more articles. --GraemeL ^(talk) 15:07, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi GraemeL, thanks for the tips and the welcome. I expect I'll be able to contribute actual content, and not just links, once I get to know my way around a bit better. I have a degree in Physics, I'm an amateur astronomer, and I've worked nearly twenty years as a software engineer. And as I'm sure you've already observed, I like to write :-) MichaelCrawford 19:11, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi again,

By starting at the five pillars of Wikipedia, I read the discussion of what should and should not be an external link. Notably it was argued that one should lift specific information from the external pages, if not actually copy the pages verbatim, if their license permits it.

While I'm happy to contribute my methods, some of them are not appropriate to Wikipedia. It was pointed out that Wikipedia is not for howtos or tutorials, but for verifiable facts. While my article contains some facts, on the whole it is a howto and a tutorial. As I said in the SEO talk page, some of my methods are not in any practical way verifiable.

My article is inappropriate to be copied verbatim because it definitely does not use a neutral tone. For example, I argue impassionately that one should not use Flash intros to homepages, and that web designers who recommend them do not have one's best interests at heart. I'm sure one could demonstrate my assertion in a verifiable way, but my purpose in writing it the way I did was not so much to inform, as to convince. Such rhetoric is not appropriate for Wikipedia.

That all said, I expect I can contribute actual content to the SEO Wikipedia entry, and I can both supply some of my verifiable facts, as well as write new versions of material that was removed but copied to the talk page.

My link has been there twelve whole hours now. I'm feeling pretty hopeful about it. MichaelCrawford 00:16, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Is Or Is Not Kazakhstan A European Union Member State?

Yesterday I was using an alphabetical list of EU member states that INCLUDED Kazakhstan, but now I'm unable to find it again.

The European Union's own _official_ website does not list Kazakhstan, nor does _this_ Wikipedia article.

If I get my own list of EU members wrong I quite likely will insult a great many undeserving people.

Thanks! -- User_Talk:MichaelCrawford — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.0.42.147 (talk) 04:58, 20 July 2018‎ (UTC)

The evidence I've been able to find says that Kazakhstan has signed an extendeded cooperation agreement with the EU, which might be considered on the pathway to becoming a member, but has not yet become a member state. Someone who included them was apparently being over-optimistic, or used something other than full membership as their inclusion criteria. — jmcgnh^{(talk) (contribs)} 05:46, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

I Am Eternally In Your Debt. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 198.0.49.227 (talk) 04:53, 22 July 2018 (UTC)

Wikipedia Takes Portland 2013!

WIKIPEDIA TAKES PORTLAND 2013! You're invited to participate in the upcoming "Wikipedia Takes Portland" campaign, to be held during the month of September. The local campaign occurs annually in conjunction with Wikipedia Takes America and Wiki Loves Monuments in the United States. Photographing sites included on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the main focus of Wikipedia Takes Portland. In typical Wikipedia fashion, you can work individually or create a team. Details and signup here!

--Another Believer _(Talk) 15:17, 26 August 2013 (UTC)