User:Gauss

My intention is to contribute to science and rationality, with side amusements of trashing Conservapedia.

First a bit of wisdom from the master:

The inspiration and role model for my satirical writing style is the person ("EarlG") who writes the weekly Top 10 Conservative Idiots column. Unfortunately, that column has been discontinued.

Outing myself -- I led twenty-one lives at Conservapedia
In addition to this account (Gauss) here.

Events over the last few months, along with recent examination of old things here (like "googling" some of my accounts in the ZB files), have left me even more appalled than I had been, (something I had thought impossible), and have led me to the conclusion that CP really has totally disintegrated, and that it is no longer gratifying to edit there for any reason. So, here goes.

A few of my accounts (I don't consider them "socks", just "alternative accounts") have been blocked, often several times, as you can see from the block count in my userboxes. But many others were never blocked. An important point to note is that none of them was ever blocked for a correct charge of "socking". Let me emphasize that. For all his self-proclaimed skill at finding socks, as of this writing Terry "checkuser" Koeckritz scored  ZERO   in terms of correctly identifying any of my accounts being socks of each other. No one else correctly identified any socks either. Of course, there were many incorrect sock accusations both public and (thanks to Conservaleaks) private. They included: the "Hitler vandal", RWillow, JaydenK, JTitor, GParker, AlanS, ILoveBush, SandraG, Aggrieved, PeterL, Hholdt, CByrd, Conservative1899, and PChurch. I never knew who any of those people were. The sysops scored zero. My only accounts were those listed below.

In fact, one of my accounts got into a brief and reasonably cordial discussion with TK (such things are extremely rare, but they do happen!) about the way to identify socks. I told him what I thought was the right way to identify socking behavior, while I was engaged in the exact behavior I was describing. He never caught on.

Why so many accounts? Some were in response to blocks, or defense against future blocks. Some were "low quality" accounts to make edits that might be taken as unfriendly (read "liberal", of course) without endangering my "high quality" accounts. Some were to drum up business for the "Multivariable Calculus" course, in order to raise the stakes for Andy. That course is SO not going to happen. About half of the accounts were through corporate proxies or anonymizing proxies. About half were just opportunistic scrounging of ISP's.

Did I engage in parody? I don't agree with the loose way that term is thrown around here at RW. There was one instance of "recreational sycophancy", that really was just a repetition of some things that Andy had said. I wanted to see if he would praise me for my wonderful insight. He did.

I never vandalized anything. Ever. Most of my edits were, in fact, serious mathematical and scientific things. I'm recreating all that at Wikiversity.

Some of my edits were attempts to talk sense to those people (like talk about complex numbers, proof by contradiction, or relativity), or occasionally to yank their chains. Diogenes was the chief perpetrator in that latter regard. He was looking for an honest man, and never found one at CP. He really unloaded on Andy.

Along the way, a few admins said nice things about me:


 * [Andy]
 * , you're a genius!
 * excellent
 * fabulous
 * thanks for providing your insights
 * amazing
 * terrific
 * wow, terrific effort!
 * fantastic
 * you have good ideas
 * superb (twice). I particularly prize these; "superb" seems to be Andy's highest expression of praise.


 * [TK]
 * a good contributor
 * Thank you, !


 * [JPatt]
 * I know righteous contributors when I read their works, You are righteous. I want you to be comfortable contributing and anything I can do to further the cause, I am there for you.

It happens that very few of these accounts ever received a "welcome" template from the powers that be. On several occasions they welcomed themselves.

Keeping track of their personalities, and the proxies and ISP's through which they were used, was quite challenging. I kept extensive notes, of course. On one occasion, I made a serious mistake through careless logging, and made essentially the same article as subpages of two different user pages. No one noticed.

In addition to my many contributions on scientific and mathematical subjects, I did extensive writing on ordinary subjects. What a waste. But fun in its own way.

Without further ado, here are the accounts, in rough chronological order:


 * CScience
 * Robert
 * Diogenes
 * Marantz
 * SamHB
 * ElizabethK
 * CarlS
 * SaraT
 * PatrickD
 * KrisJ
 * HarryJP
 * StewartR
 * BethB
 * PaulH1
 * Simeon
 * DanaS
 * LynneW
 * HalJ
 * JudyJ
 * MichaelMa
 * JasonV

CScience
This was in the early days of CP, around the time of the LA Times article. (In fact, mention of that, in the "Top 10 Conservative Idiots" column, is what brought me to CP.) The name stood for "Creation Science". My intention was to insert parody (yes, actual parody) about how gravity and heliocentrism are just theories, etc. I was going to cite Mach's principle, amidst all sorts of pseudo-scientific nonsense. Or, as Andy likes to say, claptrap. But before I did any of that, I became better versed in what sorts of things were fun to do at CP and what sorts were not. So I wrote up Maxwell's equations. Seriously. Well, I got halfway through before I was permabanned for being a sock of "ILoveBush" through my corporate internet gateway. So the Maxwell's equations article is half finished at CP. You can see the finished article at Wikiversity.

Robert
When I noticed the utter and appalling stupidity of the "Critical Thinking in Math" course, my perceptions of Andy's stupidity profile improved greatly, and I sent Robert (named after a family member) in to straighten him out. Straightening Andy out on mathematical and scientific subjects became a recurring theme in my, and many other people's, actions at CP. He [Andy] is unbelievably dense. Or, I should say, unbelievably willing to let a totally muddled worldview influence his hopeless attempts to discuss subjects that he really did learn at Princeton. Robert kept an extremely low profile, and only got blocked once, in a completely senseless action, by Karajou, for "disruption".

Diogenes
When Andy gave sysop rights to "CollegeRepublican", alleged at RW (I had by then learned about RW) to be his son, a certain Greek philosopher was so shocked that he emerged from his grave after 2300 years and renewed his search for an honest man. Didn't find one at CP. He unloaded on Andy in a blistering attack, which I no longer have. (Capturebot probably hadn't been invented at the time, and, in any case, I didn't know about it.) Update:  It's been found, and is here. Blocked by Karajou with comment "Don't mess with Andy". Before doing that, he injected some unwelcome sensibleness into the lifeboat ethics page. Deleted, of course. He also made major improvements to the "Pirates of Penzance" (my favorite Gilbert and Sullivan opera) page, and wrote the "Negro" page. You see, RobS had gotten into an argument with various people over whether the page should be nothing more than a pronunciation guide for a Spanish word. Apparently black people are too subversive for CP, at least in Rob's eyes. Diogenes rewrote it sensibly, and it's still there today.

Marantz
Named after an old friend of mine. Never used at all. My log never indicated what proxy he came from, so he was useless.

SamHB
He was my principal CP account, name and initial from the son of an acquaintance of mine. When I had to choose a full last name for his GMail account, I named it after former tennis star Boris Becker. I don't know why&mdash;I don't follow tennis. This account got blocked several times, before he learned just how thin-skinned and sensitive the CP goons (especially Ed Poor) are. Did an enormous amount of mathematical writing, both factual and on policy matters. Made many unsuccessful attempts to engage Ed "attention span of a cockroach" Poor on policy matters. His career is chronicled extensively in various pages accessible from User:SamHB and won't be recounted here.

Shortly after his first block (from Ed Poor, of course), Ed put him on probation&mdash;"You are disrupting this project. Consider yourself on probation." Multitudinous attempts to ask him about this, and find out how he could get off probation, were made over the following few years, all with no reply.

I was amused to see all the discussion of Sam at TWIGO. I obeyed the prohibition against WIGOing one's own work.

It was in the midst of all this that I (Gauss) wrote Conservapedia:Conservapedian_mathematics, always in the third person.

ElizabethK
A college student interested in chemistry. First name from a friend of mine, and last name (for GMail) from a co-worker. Fixed up quite a number of articles on the elements (and got JAllen to let her fix the template) before she got blocked in a bogus IP dragnet. She was, in any case, not really able to keep up with all the vandalism/parody that others were inserting. Some of it is quite witty. Too bad.

She got randomly bitched out by Ed "paying attention is for wusses" Poor about making mathematics articles too complicated. She never wrote about mathematics.

CarlS
An account kept in reserve, named after a co-worker from an earlier job. It was used only to place the epitaphs on the pages of SamHB and ElizabethK when they were both separately blocked over bogus IP accusations. He was blocked for this. I forgive you, Jessica. I really do. You thought it was "drive-by vandalism", during a period when there was a lot of that. But it wasn't.

SaraT
An expert on science, technology, and the history of same. Name was an amalgam of two friends. Got in an argument with Andy over some stuff in his "World History Final Exam". Survived, barely. Though Andy, as usual, was full of it. If Andy thinks "Magna Charta" is preferred over "Magna Carta", why does CP simply link the former spelling to the latter, where the actual article is?

Wrote the bulk of the article on the "Enigma" cipher machine, mostly to show how full of it Andy was. She found it exhilarating to write factual material that incidentally showed how ignorant Andy is. So did all the other people listed here.

PatrickD
A secondary math/science account. First name and initial from a coworker, full last name (for GMail) from another coworker. Essentially just a substitute for SamHB while the latter was blocked. He, along with MarkGall (also here at RW) and KSorenson, were the major participants in one of the larger blowups over relativity. His stuff was, of course, taken to Wikiversity. He and KSorenson communicated with SaraT over the historical meaning of "action at a distance". Fun.

KrisJ
She jumped in with some common sense while "Yill" was trying to inject common sense into the "counterexamples to relativity" issue. Yill appreciated what she said, but, alas, she had a brief existence&mdash;she was editing from the WiFi of a hotel that I happened to be staying at. Named after a friend. Zero percent chance that she's reading this, but, if she is, yes, Kris, that was you.

HarryJP
Like a number of other accounts, his job was to raise the stakes for Andy when Andy was making noises about some other math courses, specifically, one about linear algebra. And multivariable calculus, of course. See his talk page. Named after a great-uncle and, I don't know. Probably just thrashing around for a last initial that wasn't already taken.

StewartR
My only "recreational sycophancy" account. The "counterexamples to relativity" garbage was just too much to take. Put in some stuff that was really just a repetition of what Andy and his echo chamber were saying. Got a nice note from Andy. Named after a friend.

PaulH1
These two were just raising the stakes for Andy and his MV calculus class. Beth was the mythical daughter of a mythical person from college campus folklore. Paul was a former manager at work.

Simeon
Was created just to round out the number to 15. Was originally going to be called "SimonS", after a character in a very funny Disney TV movie. But, between names already being taken and a bug in their software that gave bogus errors about user names containing non-alphanumeric characters, I had to settle for this. He was originally just going to post a quick note schooling Andy about his latest misunderstanding about relativity, and what a "conservative vector field" means. A few more rounds of hilarity followed, including a sound thrashing of Andy, before Simeon finally pulled the plug on my Conservapedia career at 03:13 UTC, 2 Aug 2010.

DanaS
Another opportunistic use of an available IP while staying at a hotel. Let's see, what did he do? It's so hard to keep track of! Oh, yes. Well, it was a bit of recreational sycophancy. One of only two instances. About how the Bible forsaw the failure of relativity. I can't believe that they had never included that in the "Biblical scientific foreknowledge" page.

LynneW
Another hotel. An interesting bit of mathematics. You see, Andy "mathematics expert" Schlafly had put some garbage into the "set" page, about how set theory shows that gay marriage is wrong because it reduces the number of available mates. That was just too much. So she put in some actual, truthful explanations of set theory and set-theoretic notation, to show, in a cryptic way, that gay marriage increases the combinations. The set {a, b, c} was men, and {p, q, r} was women. There are 9 heterosexual combinations, and 15 combinations if there are no restrictions. The derivation was much hairier than expected, but she had plenty of time.

HalJ
This was just a test to see how hard it was to create an account through a proxy. It used to be very hard. The goons apparently used to scour proxy lists on the internet and place IP blocks on them, so finding a proxy was hard. There was no IP block on this proxy, though HalJ did get blocked by Brian for being an unspecified sock. Which is strange&mdash;sually Brian says (wrongly, of course; see all the people he has accused of being SamCoulter) who he thinks someone is a sock of. Did he know that this was a proxy that had been used by previous CP accounts, but didn't want to disclose it?

JudyJ
Apparently not. After HalJ got blocked for being an unspecified sock, JudyJ created an account using the exact same proxy. She's still there, repeatedly pwning Andy on relativity.

MichaelMa
Apparently it's really easy to ...

JasonV
create accounts on Conservapedia these days. And trolling Ken is very easy. Make a "debate" or "essay" page that ridicules him on a topic near and dear to him, and he jumps right in. And, of course, once Ken has urinated on a page, no one dares delete it.

Some useful links:
To invoke the capture bot:


 * Put the URL, with ... around it, but without the square brackets, into User:Capturebot2/sandbox, and bake at 375 degrees for a minute or so. Test for doneness by poking a mouse-click into the "reload" button on your browser.  When it comes out with "img" thing blue, it is done.


 * Remove from oven (well, copy the text that you put in, with the ..., and put in the square brackets.) You won't see the magic number for the image; that's OK.  Place on a large serving dish, or other page on this wiki.  Garnish liberally with snark.  For a more appetizing presentation, you may put in the desired visible text in the usual way, as in [http:www.conservastupida/yada/yada my text] .  But do not change the URL itself.


 * Serves 8.

RationalWiki:Community_Standards

RationalWiki:Sysop_guide

The math/science project
I am pleased to announce that nearly all of the recent math/science contributors at Conservapedia (that is, the victims of the Conservapedia:Conservapedian_mathematics and other lesser massacres) are now either here at RationalWiki, or have given permission for us to copy their material. You know who you are, or, in some cases, I have exchanged email with you. We hope to turn RW's educational articles into that which CP was not able to become.

The following CP math/science contributors are known or believed to have accounts here under their own names or (possibly hidden) other names, or have given permission for their material to be copied here: Of course, a number of these people were just me, as detailed above.
 * CScience
 * Bayes
 * Robert
 * DiEb
 * BRichtigen
 * AlanS
 * SamHB
 * ElizabethK
 * William Beason