User:Twirligig

Twirligig
— Wikipedian —
Name	Alexandra
Born	30 June 1984; London, UK
Country	USA
Current location	California
Time zone	GMT -6
Height	5'7
Hair	brown
Eyes	green
Family and friends
Marital status	married
Education and employment
Occupation	Emergency physician
Education	BS Psychology with a minor in Biology
University	Northwestern University; Stritch School of Medicine
Userboxes
1,500+	This user has made more than 1,500 contributions to Wikipedia.
	This user scored score on the Are You a Wikipediholic Test.
UK	This user uses British English.
A, B, and C	This user prefers the serial comma.
	This user is a participant in WikiProject Medicine.
	This user is a participant in WikiProject Disambiguation.
	This user is a member of; WikiProject Psychology.

Hello there!

I used to be a very active editor until med school and residency stole all of my free time. I am starting to jump back in. My main goal in working on Wikipedia was to improve its quality (and reputation in public opinion) by editing articles to conform to policy, adding references, removing unsourced info, and fixing grammatical errors. I was a member of WikiProject Disambiguation, WikiProject Medicine, WikiProject Psychology, and occasionally contributed to AfD. Currently my focus is on removing vandalism. Everything in the below sections I wrote in 2009. I've decided to leave it untouched for the sake of nostalgia.

More about me

Music: I listen primarily to punk rock. My favourite bands are The Pixies, Social Distortion, Sex Pistols, Black Flag, The Clash, Jesus and Mary Chain, Pennywise, and Danzig. I also like '80s music, specifically new wave and any pop songs with a good dance beat.
Television: I don't watch often but the shows I catch semi-regularly are SNL, The Simpsons, Family Guy, Frasier, Seinfeld, and during summer, Wipeout. I also have Netflix and rent NewsRadio and ER - I'm absolutely in love with both.
Movies: Most Netflix users are unaware that one's queue is limited to 500 movies, but I discovered this upon trying to add what was evidently the 501st movie to my queue. If I had more time to watch movies I probably wouldn't perpetually be at the limit, but at least I'm keeping Netflix in business, right? That being said, the movies I've given 5 stars are: American Beauty, Back to the Future, Batman Returns, Best in Show, Donnie Darko, Edward Scissorhands, Elephant, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Forrest Gump, Garden State, Ghost World, How to Beat the High Cost of Living, I Am Sam, Kinky Boots, Little Miss Sunshine, Living in Oblivion, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Napoleon Dynamite, Pulp Fiction, Pump Up the Volume, The School of Rock, Scotland, PA, SLC Punk, Star Trek: Generations (I like all of the Trek movies, but this is my favourite), Superbad, Thin, The Truman Show, The Virgin Suicides, What Lies Beneath, and White Oleander.
Politics: I strongly advocate letting the free market rule in place of government intrusion, and as such I self-identify as a Libertarian. (Specifically, I believe in minarchism.) That also means I support individual freedom, including same-sex marriages and women's right to abortion. It does not mean I support murder or violence. I also do not support gun control, as it restricts individual freedom. I'm an atheist. As a skeptic I'm an agnostic by definition, and while I don't believe anybody can know if a god exists, I choose to believe it does not.
Areas of expertise I apply to Wikipedia:
- While medicine is obviously an area of expertise, I spend so much time thinking about it at school that I don't want to think about it during my free time. The major exception is pharmacology, as that has always interested me.
- My bachelor's degree is in Psychology, and I'm most knowledgeable about social psychology, psychometrics, and attachment theory.
- I'm fascinated by the history of Boston, especially related to ethnic groups and politics, and have done a fantastic amount of research on it.
- I believe in psychological astrology - that the position of the planets at the time of one's birth describe specific personality traits of that person - but not predictive astrology (horoscopes) or that the planets are a causal mechanism for personality. My dream is to design and carry out an experiment that would confirm or disconfirm psychological astrology, most likely using an established measure of personality like the NEO or MBTI and seeing if people with the same/similar results share any astrological signs.

Twirligig wuz here

Here's a selection of articles I've created or improved with major rewrites/expansion...

Episodic learning
Avulsion injury
Talk:Adderall/Archive 1 gigantic talk page desperately needed archiving
Biomedical waste
List of medical inhalants
Orally disintegrating tablet
James Michael Curley
John F. Collins

My babies

The pages to which I devote the most time and effort:

Boston City Council

Watchdoggery

Frequently vandalised pages I monitor:

Dab pages I monitor for links:

(If you create a link to any of these, you will receive a friendly template reminder on your talk page :) )

WikiToDoList

Short-term

finish expanding John F. Collins
expand Advanced maternal age...I can't believe an article about a medical term has no medical info in it!
finish repairing dab links to Reliability
copyedit Case study in psychology

Long-term

copyedit & expand astrology articles
copyedit articles related to statistical validity and reliability
continue working on Boston City Council and Joseph Tierney
expand Hyde Park, Massachusetts
finish link repair on Wikipedia:MeSH F01
copyedit & expand Maura Tierney to GA status

My favourite articles

The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations: every story ever written is a variation of these 36 plotlines
Epsom, Surrey: my hometown <3
Sacred Cod of Massachusetts
My philosophical views:
- Metaphysics: realism
  - Matter: neutral monism
  - Space & time: stage theory perdurantism
  - Theology: atheism
- Epistemology: internalism ("I think; therefore, I am") and skepticism ("No one knows anything")
- Ethics: moral nihilism
- Aesthetics: Wittgensteinian intuitionist (that which constitutes aesthetics lies outside of linguistics..."a picture is worth a thousand [non-existent] words", which is the reason for the picture) and further, art is a way of representing something from the mental space (i.e. emotion, experience) in the physical space