User:Jomegat

Jomegat

My real name is Jim Thomas. Among many other things, I am the Director of the Central New Hampshire Flames Pathfinder Club. My involvement with Pathfinders has inspired me to organize the Adventist Youth Honors Answer Book at Wikibooks back in October 2005. The project grew until 2011 when I was inspired to ask the NAD to adopt the project so that we could expand it to include an instructor's manual for the new Investiture Achievement curricula (which replaced Advent Youth - or AY - that same year).

The IA and AY curricula are more religiously overt than the Honors are, so it was not possible to host an IA Instructor's Manual at Wikibooks. Wikibooks has a Neutral Point of View (NPOV) policy that would prohibit the inclusion of overtly religious material. The NAD embraced the concept, the material was imported here.

An additional advantage of hosting with the NAD is that we can now include images of the Honor insignia. The NAD allows the use of this copyrighted material in conjunction with youth ministries only. That meant the images could not be hosted by Wikimedia (the organization that runs Wikibooks and Wikipedia). They require that any images they host be licensed such that they can be used for any purpose including commercial. By hosting these resources here, we are not bound by those policies (though I do agree that their policies are a very good idea in general).

With the exception of church-related insignia and graphics, we are still bound by the licensing adopted by Wikimedia. All of the material here except for said images is licensed under the Creative-Commons CC-BY-SA license. That is what allowed us to create these resources in the first place. Other people around the globe contributed material to Wikipedia, which we were able to include and modify for use here, provided that the modified work also be licensed under CC-BY-SA. This is a Very Good Thing, and it means that you are allowed to reproduce, modify, adapt, or even bind and sell any of the text you find here. CC-BY-SA is designed to protect the user of the material, not the producer.

Why Jomegat?

Jomegat would be more properly rendered J Omega T, or jωt. My middle initial is W, and the Greek letter omega looks a lot like a w, so jωt (which appears in a lot of equations found in electrical engineering) looks deceptively similar to my initials. In fact I was working with some of these equations once when my wife asked me what I was doing. When I told her I was working on a math problem, she said "That's not math. First of all, there aren't any numbers on that page, and second, you've written your initials all over it."

I hadn't noticed the similarity until that moment. And there were no numbers on the page

More About Jomegat

I am also an electrical engineer, father of three, and husband of one. I advocate the use of Open Source Software (I switched from DOS to Linux in 1995, before Windows 95 was released), and I love woodworking, whitewater paddling, hiking, camping, and identifying wild plants.

Honors

These are the honors I have earned. They are listed according to the year I earned them (most recent first) and then alphabetically.

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