User:Ckerr
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Me, in rectangular form:
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Cliff Kerr is currently a PhD student at the University of Sydney working on biophysical modelling of the brain.* (Effectively, we treat the brain as a giant slinky.) I'm also doing a postgraduate Diploma of Music. You can read all about it, and listen to some of my works, here. I currently live in Sydney, Australia, but used to hail from Mackay, Queensland, and before that, San Francisco, and before that, Western Australia. I'm actually half Lithuanian, a descendant of Vincas Grybas.
In addition to physics, my equal love is music. I adore 20th century music, such as Bartók, Mompou, Ravel, and Messiaen, to name a few. I am both a composer and a pianist, but due to my pitiful sightreading and the continual glut of child prodigies, I think I will be more successful as the former. I also do a bit of conducting.
As far as interests go, I'm fascinated by philosophy of just about every flavour, and am intrigued by different religions, although personally I believe in a world devoid of anything spooky. Some interesting philosophical ideas (especially for form and movement) come from martial arts, which I have been studying on and off since I was ten.
Check out my articles on the Clausius-Clapeyron relation and Anne Boyd. I've also contributed to articles on Peter Sculthorpe, the Saha equation, bow shocks, and Ravel's Miroirs. The main times I contribute to Wikipedia are when I need to look something up, and Wikipedia doesn't have it. If I do find out enough about it, then I write an article on it. My articles on the F-factor, Bland-Altman plotting, and Music for a while were created for this reason.
With regard to Wikipedia itself, I've become rather disillusioned by the editing process: specifically, by the deletionists and other editors who, to me, seem to fail to grasp the tremendous versatility of the medium. That said, it is still my first point of reference for things that don't particularly matter, and often even for those that do. Interestingly, in my experience, undergraduate physics students typically cite Wikipedia articles in their reports more frequently than any other source, including their textbook—though I have yet to see a student cite one of my articles!
* Apologies for the egregious use of third person, but I wanted to include my real name so that this page shows up in Google search results; it's better than some of the other stuff on Google about me!
