In formal academic writing, should the paragraphs be aligned left or justified? As well, how many spaces of indent should there be between subsequent paragraphs and should there be a line space between each paragraph? Thanks. [[User:Acceptable|Acceptable]] ([[User talk:Acceptable|talk]]) 02:13, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
In formal academic writing, should the paragraphs be aligned left or justified? As well, how many spaces of indent should there be between subsequent paragraphs and should there be a line space between each paragraph? Thanks. [[User:Acceptable|Acceptable]] ([[User talk:Acceptable|talk]]) 02:13, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
:It varies. Get a copy of the journal you want to submit to, and see what they do. --[[User:Trovatore|Trovatore]] ([[User talk:Trovatore|talk]]) 02:17, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
:It varies. Get a copy of the journal you want to submit to, and see what they do. --[[User:Trovatore|Trovatore]] ([[User talk:Trovatore|talk]]) 02:17, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
== this is a question from a Millenium Quiz ==
Determine from the beginning letters of the following 'phrase' what the answer is for the phrase
The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.
I have been told about some porno sites (I'll list one of them,but I don't know how Wikipedia reacts to having sites like THAT here. I'm referring to the fact that Bigfoot is featured on something like that, no more, no less.) refer to the creature having sex with people. Can this be placed in the "Cultural section" regarding Bigfoot ?
I can't make head or tail of your question. But if you're asking whether the "fact" that "Bigfoot" is "featured" (shown?) on this or that porn website can be placed in such-and-such an article here, you might ask in the talk page of that article. -- Hoary (talk) 00:57, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Rule 34. In fact, I'd like to propose an extended version - if you can imagine it, (a) there is porn of it, and (b) it's been referenced on at least one of The Simpsons, Family Guy and South Park. And given how many people want to get rid of all the trivial "in pop culture" references to (b), I'd suggest not including (a) unless you have some kind of source talking about the existence of Bigfoot porn (e.g. a magazine article on wacky porn sites, or something). Oh, and as for "how Wikipedia reacts to having sites like THAT", Wikipedia is not censored. Confusing Manifestation(Say hi!) 04:08, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm going to do my best to describe the song. It starts and ends with a high pitched, fast-tempoed arpeggio. I think the lyrics are something about believing in yourself. I think it was a song from the 80's and it could be considered "arena rock." Any suggestions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by KeeganB (talk • contribs) 07:18, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I am facing this severe psychological complex in which I find myself preoccupied with research on this question 'WHAT DOES A GIRL DO WHEN SHE SEES A HANDSOME GUY?'.I think the only way out is to find an accurate solution to this query.Please save me,I am becoming mad. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 218.248.2.51 (talk) 09:33, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The answer is clearly, "It depends on the girl." If you have a specific girl that you are wondering about, go ask her. If she is unavailable, ask her closest friends (although there is no guarantee that the answer for the peer group will match the subject's). If you are wondering about the set containing all girls, just randomly ask girls with widely different characteristics (such as age, class, marital status, and sexual orientation) as you encounter them, and build data systematically. You could also interview handsome guys and see if they have observed patterns. Use the scientific method whenever possible; it will never lead you astray. Also, treat the world with a relaxed sense of whimsy; it's a lot more comfortable than obsessing over the ways other people regard you. Good luck. Faithfully, Deltopia (talk) 10:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is outside of my area of expertise, but I think that most girls are less preoccupied with guys' looks than guys are with girls' looks. For a girl, personality is often more important than looks. So, she may think to herself, hmm, he's handsome, I wonder what he's like? Then she is likely to try to observe him without seeming to observe him to see what he is like. If his personality is appealing, she may try to catch his attention. Of course, different personalities appeal to different girls. Some like guys who are funny, some like the strong silent type, others like guys who are hip or stylish, and so on. 192.251.134.5 (talk) 16:26, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The problem with credit cards is that people who are not yet old enough to enter into legally binding contracts cannot have them since using the card constitutes entering into a contract in which you promise to pay for something in the future. There should be no problem with an 18 year old using a debit card since the money is removed from your account when you make the transaction. The question is only whether the Maestro system is acceptable to the online store - and that's going to vary from a place to place. Here in the USA, I have a debit card with a VISA logo on it - so you can use it in places where VISA is accepted (which is to say: everywhere) - and yet it acts like a debit card. If you had one of those - you'd be able to handle anything. SteveBaker (talk) 20:40, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
E-Tool
I've been searching on the internet and I can't find the answer to my question anywhere: What is the length of the modern E-Tool used by the US military (specifically Marine Corps)? I want to know the length of TODAY'S E-tool, not the M1943 E-tool. Thanks in advance. --MKnight998913:42, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, the article shovel differentiates a spade and an entrenching tool. An e-tool is a type of shovel, but not all shovels are e-tools, and an e-tool is not a spade. And, to my knowledge, all the U.S. Armed Forces use the M-1967 entrenching tool, but I don't have a reference. --— Gadget850 (Ed)talk - 18:38, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What is the best way to clean a cheese grater? Mine is the type very handily pictured at Grater.Apart from ripping my teatowel to shreds,the design means that you can't get a cloth right up to the top bit because it's too narrow and there's a handle in the way.This means that the bits of cheese are stuck there with no way to remove them...
Aye, a dishwasher is able to get the water hot enough to basically melt the cheese off or at least get it hot enough that the spray gets it clean. Dismas|(talk)14:07, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I keep a toothbrush by the sink for this and similar purposes. DuncanHill may have had good results with a sponge scourer, but I find that the cheese grater shreds the scouring material and that scouring fibers get caught on the blades of the grater. 192.251.134.5 (talk) 16:19, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe I'm being slow, but why don't you just wipe in the direction it doesn't grate? If you wipe down or scrub, then yes is will grate the scourer, but if you wipe up this isn't a problem surely? Combined with hot soapy water, this works for me. Skittle (talk) 16:47, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That works fine on the parts of the grater where the blades all face in one direction. I was assuming that the asker was asking about the part of the grater (if it is like my grater) where there are little raised perforations with blades facing in at least four different directions. That's the part that is hard to clean without a fine brush. 192.251.134.5 (talk) 18:29, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
For wiping, you can let it drip-dry. Assuming your kitchen doesn't have toxic air, it might even be more hygienic. Shake off most of the drips and leave it on a drying rack, or even on the bench for half an hour. It should be dry then. Washing it is probably best with a brush rather than a scourer or dishcloth. Steewi (talk) 00:08, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's a pass from a player who is close to the basket (in the post, usually) to an open player outside. The player close to the basket will generally attract more defensive attention, giving the outside player an open shot. Recury (talk) 19:01, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Proof of somebody suddenly disappearing without tr...
There are several stories of people disappearing into thin air-David Lang,Oliver Larch,Benjamin Bathurst but these are all believed to be hoaxes as even though there were allegedly witnesses,there was no actual physical evidence.
If it was caught on camera that for instance a runner in a race or footballer in a match suddenly vanished into thin air,with thousands of witnesses around,what effect would that have?
Would it increase belief in the paranormal?Would it just be dismissed as a stunt or some sort of illusion? Lemon martini (talk) 15:49, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
We can't really speculate on something that has never happened. The Ref desk is more for factual questions than speculation. Whatever we come up with will most likely just be our opinion. Dismas|(talk)19:11, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I hate the "we don't speculate" response because in fact we do speculate! We speculate, we imagine, we give opinions, we talk about hypotheticals, all the time, every day! In my experience the "we don't speculate" answer almost always means "I don't really know, I don't really care, and I don't think anyone else has an answer either," none of which are great reasons to answer or not answer. (Whenever I feel myself wanting to write down one of those sorts of things as a response, I just stop myself.)
And while one might be eager to say that we'd have no basis to speculate here, we can, of course, appeal to past examples of "paranormal" things being announced (whether we agree with their ultimate paranormality or not). I think the boring answer here is that people inclined to believe in the paranormal are going to see it as a justification for their own beliefs, and people (like me) who are very skeptical of something violating the laws of physics are going to place their bets on a naturalistic explanation even if we don't have a ready one at hand. "Caught on camera" is not actually very good evidence at all—cameras have been known to be easy to fool since they were invented—and just because people wouldn't necessarily know what the good answer was doesn't mean there isn't one (I don't know what all UFOs are reported to be, but I doubt they are extraterrestrials). And we know that there are people who will believe to be supernatural even things which are announced by the performers as flim flam, much less things which appeal to their sense of how the world might be arranged. In any case, the ultimate answer of "what would happen" depends on who you are talking about. It is fairly easy to predict the responses of scientists as a group, for example, and also fairly easy to predict the responses of dedicated paranormalists. Everyone in between, though, would probably go one way or the other. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 21:44, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No - in this case I agree with Dismas. This is an impossible question. "If something utterly impossible happens - what will happen next?" - you can't answer that in any meaningful manner. Just about the only thing I would say is that as soon as something is provably real, it tends to move from the realms of the paranormal into the mainstream and everyone accepts it. This doesn't happen much - but one example I could think of would be Giant Sea Monsters...which turned out to be...well, giant, sea monsters! Colossal Squid...fifty feet long and strong enough to take on and kill a whale! We've managed to prove that they actually do exist, but only seriously, convincingly in the last 5 year. But now nobody bothers that the occasional fisherman will come back with "tall tales" of massive tentacled monsters - and not many paranormal people talk about them anymore because they've become "normal". It's become mundane - but 50 years ago, nobody would have believed you.
When this happens, the remainder of things that are paranormal remain in the paranormal and continue to be widely (and reasonably) disbelieved.
One assumes that enough evidence would remain here for science to figure out what happened - maybe it's explainable by the normal laws of science - maybe it needs new laws of science. But you can bet that the paranormal nut-jobs would just move on to something else. But people who have "just vanished" are very likely to be falling foul of deaths that mean their bodies are never found - or they are people who intended to vanish and leave "to start a new life"...who knows? SteveBaker (talk) 23:39, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
My point was that epistemologically you'd never be able to establish for sure that it was "impossible" anyway. To claim you know a priori that they did, indeed, "just vanish" (i.e. violate the laws of conservation of mass/energy), posits a sure knowledge that no individual is going to have. If we instead go with the phenomenological approach—"what did people see? what is the evidence?"—then it's not hard to guess how people would, in a very general sense, interpret it. We don't have to care whether or not it violates the laws of physics for that to be the case. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 00:20, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The case of John Darwin, which is one of the biggest and most interesting ongoing news stories in Britain at the moment, has some relevance here. The article I have linked contains some interesting relevant material on this subject. I have to say that even at this early stage in the "story", it looks like it may well become one of those fascinating "once-in-a-generation" cases that will be remembered and talked about for a long time. Hassocks5489 (talk) 23:53, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I doubt the John Darwin story will really be talked about for very long. Look at the list of similar cases at Pseudocide - some of them MUCH more notorious than this one. Are we still talking about John Stonehouse? He was a major politician who did something rather similar - winding up in Australia with "the other woman". The person most renowned for this has to be Lord Lucan - although it's never been proved conclusively that he actually faked his death, there are many more tantalising signs and a much 'juicier' story involving murder and boatloads of money - a story that he had hidden in a zoo and died after being mauled by a Tiger - or that he had taken up a career as a hunter in India and was now nicknamed "Jungle Barry"!...you just can't make that stuff up - THAT one goes into the history books. SteveBaker (talk) 17:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The reference desk is for giving references to questions. The OP should note he is asking for an opinion for which no reference can really be given. Strictly speaking I think if there were any references we could give the OP it would be found on either the Humanities or Science desk - by asking them how people would react to a seemingly paranormal occurence, that possibly an illusion. Here's your first reference, see IllusionRfwoolf (talk) 15:23, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The interesting thing about "sea monsters" is that before they were proven to be real, the nobody in Steve's "nobody would have believed you" would have included scientists (not quite grammatically sound, but I hope you know what I mean). They'd have said that not only was there no evidence for them, it was physiologically impossible they could exist anyway. Now we know this isn't true. Many other things were proclaimed as "scientifically impossible" before they were actually demonstrated. So, what is and isn't possible is not necessarily something that science has the last word on. But this gets me into the area of how we know for sure what "science" says about any particular non-core question. One scientist will say X, another will say Y, and both will back up their belief with "science". They can't both be right. Maybe neither is right. Many scientists believe that whatever's in Loch Ness, it's 100% certainly no monster - or even a community of them - so there'd be no point even looking because whatever you find, it wouldn't be evidence of a monster. Others are sufficiently curious to go and spend very long periods searching for evidence. -- JackofOz (talk) 22:17, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's not quite fair. I doubt anyone would have claimed they were physiologically impossible - we have whales - sea animals can get pretty big - there was no problem with THAT. I think the problem would have been entirely in the "Well, if they exist, where is the evidence?"...and, eventually, there was evidence. There aren't too many things that scientists say is impossible that turn out to be possible after all...at least not in the last 100 years or so. You often hear things like "Scientists claim that bees can't possibly fly but the bees don't know that! Hahaha! Stoopid Scientists!"...but careful checking reveals that these are typically urban legends - or at least a gross mis-reading of a statement like: "We don't currently understand how bees fly."
You're ill-informed about Loch Ness - it's been studied extremely carefully - lots of sonar sweeps, mini-submarine surveys, automatically triggered cameras - you name it. But you really don't need all of that - it's clear that there cannot be such a creature in there is the basic math: In order for genetic diversity to prevail - there would need to be a regular population of at least 50 animals. Given the size people claim they are, and how active they must need to be to do what is claimed - they must consume such-and-such amount of food per day. Growth rate of plants in the loch is terrible because it's very turbid and no sunlight reaches plants - the only other food source is fish - but there aren't many fish in the loch and you can show that 50 top predators would empty the lake of fish in a matter of months and then starve to death. The ceatures can't get into our out of the loch without being seen because the inlet and outlets of the lake are shallow. Ergo - there are no monsters in Loch Ness. QED. SteveBaker (talk) 00:09, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I genuinely hope for your sake that that analysis doesn't come back to haunt you some day, Steve. :) I'm intrigued as to why scientists would have bothered to expend the time and energy they have in looking for signs of life there, if what you say is true. If they know there's nothing to look for, just what is it they're ... looking for? This seems to confirm what I said above: you and others are convinced there's no monster there because it's mathematically impossible; others obviously don't agree (and didn't Sir Peter Scott go out on a limb and actually give the supposed Nessie a scientific name, Nessiteras rhombopoteryx? I know some say this was a hoax because of the anagram, but that may have just been a post-hoc realisation.) So just what is the scientific position? The answer really does seem to depend on which scientist you talk to. -- JackofOz (talk) 06:49, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Drug- DMT
I have recently been told about a drug called DMT which can be synthesized, but is found naturally in the human brain and is released just before death to produce a hallucinogenic state. How can such a thing have evolved? Something to ease your passing can not be a trait which is passed on from generation to generation, there is no 'survival of the fittest' reaso for such a mechanism to exist, so why does it? RobertsZ (talk) 16:29, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There is some discussion of that theory in the Dimethyltryptamine article. Note that it is in the section titled 'Speculation. Specifically, it mentions first that "Dr. Rick Strassman, [...] advanced the theory that a massive release of DMT from the pineal gland prior to death or near death was the cause of the near death experience (NDE) phenomenon", and then goes on to include "Strassman speculated that DMT is made in the pineal gland,[...] However, no one has looked for DMT in the pineal yet." Without any proof that DMT does indeed act as suggested, it is premature to question how such a mechanism would have evolved. --LarryMac | Talk16:48, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
So it hasn't been determined that DMT is actually released just before death, it has just been found within the body and its hallucinogenic affect has been noted? RobertsZ (talk) 16:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Took some dmt a few years ago, pretty good stuff, you can watch yourself walk into the next room, and then BAMB! your back with yourself, but just as soon as that happens, you are walking away again, or sitting down, one always seems to be a few second behind ones self. Freaky, very Hunter S Thompson. Adrenalin is pretty good too, but doesnt last for long. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.191.136.3 (talk) 17:01, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure what your getting at Atlant, but your list still made me smile, looks like a list of my typical wikipedia browsing, end up totaly off topic, from DMT you got to shoe polish, amazing. RobertsZ (talk) 18:39, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If I were to guess, Atlant is pointing out that there are tons of ways our brains react to minute doses of chemicals that produce euphoric effects, and that you don't have to have the brain specifically evolve towards any one of them for the possibility to be there. Our brains did not "evolve" to recognize LSD; LSD happens to be a chemical which plays games with our neurons based just on how they are. (Also note, re: another comment I made earlier, let's not always assume that we are talking about specifically human evolution here—it could be an issue with primates, with mammals in general, etc. Don't assume any given trait a human has was uniquely evolved for human beings.) --23:54, 13 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.147.86.187 (talk)
The answer to what I was getting at was contained in the last Wikilink I provided ;-). It's the first thing I flash to whenever I hear "DMT".
(squeeze): Toluene (C7H8 (C6H5CH3) is a component of inhalants, such as glue, nail polish remover, paint thinner and shoe cream. It produces a high of sorts for sniffers of normal household chemicals. Sadly, some people have died from inhaling such aerosols. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 20:27, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's possible that there could be an evolutionary basis for this (although I personally doubt it). We are social animals who live in groups with our offspring. Suppose someone who has a gene for an "easy death" - which is passed onto their kids - dies in the presence of all of their children. The fact that their death was "easy" and seemingly painless might reduce the incidence of depression and anxiety in their children and thereby improve their chances of having children of their own and passing on the gene. Someone who thrashes around, yelling and screaming in pain and terror might very well cause their children to be grieving for much longer - and therefore unwilling or unable to procreate for a long time after. SteveBaker (talk) 20:00, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah that makes sense, a very logical attempt at explaining how DMT may have evolved, although even you say you doubt your theory, it is by far the most sensible answer so far, thanks Steve. Any more answers or ideas are welcome, RobertsZ (talk) 21:46, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Seems a bit doubtful to me. The effect on an overall population would be pretty small, I imagine, and concerns with "easy deaths" and "good deaths" are historically contingent, not culturally universal (there is a rich literature on the history of death for those who are interested, though we don't have a Wikipedia article on the subject, amazingly!). Personally if there was such an effect, I would expect it to be related to something else, not a specialized "death drug" but rather a scaled up version of a standard response to shock or something like that, or the inadvertant result of the brain hemorrhaging, etc. It seems unlikely to me that there would be enough selective pressure to evolve a specific death response of this sort. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:52, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Given enough time, evolution can optimise some pretty subtle things. Think about (my favorite evolution example) Adult Lactose tolerance. That confers a benefit only when:
You're a farmer who keeps milk-producing animals (cows, sheep, goats)...and...
There is some kind of a severe food shortage during your lifetime...and...
The food shortage somehow doesn't affect your animals enough to prevent them from lactating but is severe enough to affect humans really badly...and...
Your cultural taboos don't prevent you from milking animals and drinking their milk. Bear in mind that you are the only sick weirdo who does this! Everyone else who ever tried it got ill because they were lactose intolerant - so tribal lore stretching back generations says that adults don't drink milk!...and...
The shortage goes on long enough that your competitors are forced to slaughter their animals and eat them while you sit back and drink milk...and...
You can survive to reproduce on that diet while your competitors either died or failed to reproduce as a result.
That's a pretty contorted set of conditions! Yet most of us have that gene. If evolution favored an advantage as small and specialised as that one, it's perhaps not such a stretch to imagine that an 'easy death' gene could confer a similar amount of overall advantage.
But as I said before, I'm only saying that it COULD happen - I very much doubt that it actually did. That gland and the chemical it secretes must be there for another reason. The cost to humans to grow and maintain an organ throughout their entire lives whose only purpose is something this rare and subtle would surely exceed it's benefit. In the lactose tolerance case, all that happened is that there was a failure in the switch that normally turns off a mammal's ability to digest milk once it is weaned. No new burden is placed on the creature because of that.
One annoying thing about winter is having to switch underwear at least once every day. Outdoors, it's too cold to wear short underwear. Indoors, it's too hot to wear long underwear. During work, I can manage wearing long underwear the whole time, but when I get back home, I have to immediately switch to short underwear.
Is this any easier for women? Women's stockings cover the whole leg but seem to be made of thinner cloth. My father told me he once met a British man who admitted to wearing women's stockings at winter, to keep warm. Should I also investigate to the issue? JIP | Talk20:17, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You could turn the heating down at home so it is comfortable to wear long underwear all the time, and save on fuel bills? I don't recommend ladies stockings: they are likely to be too short for you, and you will either have to negotiate the lumpiness of garter belts or the sweatiness of tights. SaundersW (talk) 21:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Many moons ago me and some archaeologist friends were excavating the graveyard of a medieval church in Yorkshire, UK - knackering cold winter with snow and ice, and we were digging the skeletons which involved lying on the ground to get to them. Quite a few of the men started wearing women's tights (I guess that's pantyhose in American) under their long johns, under their Army surplus combat trousers, under their ex-German Army tank suits. They swore by them, said they really helped keep their legs warm. (Some I suspect might have enjoyed wearing them just a little too much). I always wondered what the hospital staff would have made of it if one of these rufty tufty burly muddy men was brought in after and accident and had to have his clothes cut off him....86.158.131.45 (talk) 09:39, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I agree about less heating at home, if it's an option. You might also consider wearing easily removable layers for outdoors. A second pair of trousers over the top of your work trousers might keep you warm, but you don't have to change when you get to work, rather just removing a layer like you take off a coat. This is something many motorcycle riders use every day. A long, good quality, ankle length coat might also have a similar effect. Steewi (talk) 00:14, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Having lived most of my life in very cold places (Alaska, Finland, Michigan, Chicago, etc) I can sympathize with your plight. However, there's a solution! I would suggest investing in some silk underwear! Not only is silk fantastically comfortable, it is also the premier fabric to have next to your skin during the winter. It insulates you when you need to stay warm, and it keeps you cool when you need to stay cool. It does a great job of wicking away perspiration, and it is lightweight so it doesn't weigh you down like thick cotton long johns do. I don't want to push any particular company, but if you google the words "winter", "silk", and "underwear", you'll find some good sources online to select from. Some companies will even send you a catalog with photos of pretty ladies wearing silk underwear, which might also (depending on your inclination) keep you warm in the winter, too. Just kidding! Saukkomies04:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, here's a photo from a silk underwear online catalog of what I'm talking about. These long underwear are incredibly lightweight, but I can guarantee you that they work! Saukkomies20:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm puzzled by this question. Maybe I'm missing the point but don't most people wear an overcoat, hat, scarf, whatever outdoors, and take them off indoors? Changing overwear is simpler than changing underwear.--Shantavira|feed me10:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Of course I wear an overcoat, hat, scarf and gloves outdoors in winter. They're necessary but not sufficient. If all I had covering my legs were my trousers they'd freeze. So yes, I do need two layers of trousers. In some exceptional conditions, such as ski trips over 20 km long, I wear three layers of trousers. JIP | Talk15:24, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
December 14
Lucite
How hard would it be to mount something of my own in lucite without having irregularities, bubbles, etc. or killing myself on fumes? I'm thinking about mounting a rock in lucite, but am not seeing any easy or cost-effective way to do that. I should probably note that am a complete klutz in any sort of laboratory situation and couldn't be expected to do anything complicated. (Also, is it just me, or does lucite's chemical composition look a lot like a praying mantis?) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 00:14, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You might consider looking up information on clear casting resins. For instance, there Castin' Craft resins. I tried to cast an old processor chip into their clear poly resin. It didn't work all that well, but I suspect that was more due to the age of the chemicals. No bubbles, but it didn't harden all the way. Fresh chemicals and a little experience might work better. The fumes are pretty potent, and things work better when it is warm, so doing it outside in the winter might not work so well. Their Easy Cast product might be easier to work with, but I have no experience with it. --Mdwyer (talk) 04:29, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've used the Castin' Craft stuff - you can get it at lots of craft/hobby stores. Getting the exactly correct mixture should solve the not-hardening problem. Make sure you measure out the resin and hardner exactly - don't "eyeball" it. Perhaps the age of the chemicals were a factor for Mdwyer - but the cold conditions would certainly be an issue - it needs to harden in a reasonably warm place. Making sure there are no bubbles can be very tricky - the last time I did this (which was a VERY long time ago), I used a long needle to kind of gently nudge the bubbles to the surface before the resin hardened. Because this is somewhat tricky to do just right, you should practice encasing an object that isn't too important to you before you attempt to preserve something really important - it helps a lot to know what to expect - and there is nothing like actually doing it to teach you! Whilst you're not likely to kill yourself with the fumes, you do need the canonical "well ventilated area" to do the work. SteveBaker (talk) 13:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's actually rather difficult to build fast, efficient programs to do this because hyperbolic space is non-linear. That is to say that straight lines translate into curves. This means that modern 3D graphics hardware (which deep-down-inside can only draw simple, straight-edged, triangles) cannot be used directly. Instead, each object would have to be diced up into a really fine grid and drawn with hundreds or perhaps thousands of triangles to approximate the curved space. Worse still, their build-in idea of perspective foreshortening and the representation they use for depth into the screen pretty much assumes a linear coordinate system and that would probably break in interesting and exciting ways!
However, for static images - or for pre-rendering a movie frame-by-frame, I would imagine that you could do this fairly easily with a raytracer that supports plug-ins (which is probably all of them). Sadly, I don't have much expertise in the non-realtime areas of computer graphics - so I can't tell you precisely which package you need or how to do this in detail. As a thought - you might re-ask this question on the Math help desk, it's likely that something like MathCAD or Mathematica could do this kind of thing for you. SteveBaker (talk) 13:42, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't expect a raytracer to do too well either. In Euclidean space, ray-object intersections are easy to compute, but once light no longer travels in straight lines, the math gets ugly in a hurry. --Carnildo (talk) 23:50, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Real-Time Rendering in Curved Spaces by Jeff Weeks makes the interesting observation that the homogeneous coordinates used by stock 3D hardware can accommodate elliptical and hyperbolic spaces without any extra work. There's a companion website with free DirectX and OpenGL sample code. Polygon edges are (wrongly) rendered as straight lines, but as long as the edge lengths are small compared to the radius of curvature it isn't really noticeable.
It's possible to render polygons with curved edges in real time on stock hardware by rendering to a cube map and thence to the screen. This works for fisheye distortion and similar effects (see Fisheye Quake), but I don't see any obvious way to use it here. -- BenRG (talk) 01:25, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hyperbolic straight lines are represented as circular arcs in the conformal Poincaré model, but as straight lines in the Beltrami-Klein model. In this picture of H3 tiled with right-angled dodecahedra, note that the edges appear straight. Unfortunately I've yet to find a reference that will stoop to anything so grubby as to tell me the bleeping formulas I'd need to write a simple hyperbolic raytracer. —Tamfang (talk) 09:49, 28 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry: An analytic approach, by Patrick Ryan, appears to give most of what I need, if I ever make the time to work with it. —Tamfang (talk) 07:42, 16 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]
An Italian film called, Un Fatto di Sangue Nel Commune di Sculiana Fra Due Uomini per Causa di Una Vedova si Sospetano Moventi Politici. Amore-morte-shimmy. Lugano Belle. Tarantelle. Taralucci è Vino. (1978). Known in English as Revenge. Rockpocket00:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Among IMDB titles, Another Demonstration of the Cliff-Guibert Fire Horse Reel, Showing a Young Girl Coming from an Office, Detaching Hose, Running with It 60 Feet, and Playing a Stream, All Inside of 30 Seconds (1900). --jpgordon∇∆∇∆00:58, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D[2]
Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Hellbound, Flesh-Eating Subhumanoid Zombified Living Dead, Part 3[3]
But, these are not original movies. They are classic movies with redubbed audio.
The Fable of the Kid Who Shifted His Ideals to Golf and Finally Became a Baseball Fan and Took the Only Known Cure[4]
Honorable mention, for a Hollywood production by Stanley Kubrick released by Paramount in 1967: "Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama's Hung You in the Closet and I'm Feeling So Sad" [5]. Edison (talk) 05:50, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The longest title of a well known film is Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines or How I Flew from London to Paris in 25 hours 11 minutes. Some of the Carry On films have alternative long titles, although I've only ever seen then mentioned in books about the Carry On films. An example is Carry on at Your Convenience or Down the Spout or Ladies Please Be Seated or Up the Workers or Labour Relations Are the People Who Come to You When You're Having a Baby--80.176.225.249 (talk) 19:54, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Without having any knowledge on the subject, I imagine that the problem with a banana is that it doesn't have enough water in it and/or its internal cell structure is such that it will deform more than it will break and be liquified. Raw potatoes are crispy enough and full of enough water that it isn't too surprising that they could be juiced. (Note that if this were some sort of children's cartoon I'd probably break out into song about all of the fruits that can be juiced... You can juice a blueberry / As long as its washed / But don't juice a cherry / If the pit isn't tossed! / Oh, there are so many wonderful fruits / That taste really lovely / if they are juiced!) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 03:13, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Of course we should note that raw potatoes are quite indigestible - so whatever you do with the resulting mess, you'd need to heat it up enough to rupture the cell walls before you could consider drinking it. That would probably result in some kind of potato soup. Bananas are useful to add to other fruit for making 'smoothies' because their texture adds a lot of 'body' to the resulting liquid...but by themselves, there isn't enough liquid to turn them into 'banana juice'. SteveBaker (talk) 13:27, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
bananajuice is (at least in stores in germany) a mix of bananapuree and applejuice. potatojuice i have seen a few times made by healthfanatics (they are cured from it as far as i know ;) but never did try it, looked not very appetizing. Elvis (talk) 15:47, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Distribution of books across Dewey or LOC categories
I recently had an idea that it would be neat to read a statistically reasonable sample of books across all the different subject areas. One basic way would be to read a book in each major Dewey or LOC category. This is far from perfect, however, because these categories have wildly different number of books in them, and so it would make more sense to do a true (or nearly true) statistical sample. But for this I need to know what percentage of the total is in each category. I wasn't able to find any numbers of this sort. Any thoughts? (Please note: I'd really like fine-grained statistics, like for each of the 1000 Dewey categories or even more, and not just for the 10 major groups).
One idea I had was to download a catalog of a small/medium library that has call numbers using one of these systems, and then compute the statistics off of that, but I can't find any catalog that's in a list form rather than a search interface.
--Ornil (talk) 04:48, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You would definitely get different results from each sampling. The Library of Congress System has 21 broad subject areas, while Dewey only has 10. Why does the Dewey Decimal System only have 10, you might ask? Because Melville Dewey was a nutcase, that's why. He had a mystical belief that all human knowledge could be neatly compartmentalized into ten broad categories. And when reality didn't fit his theory, he forced subjects together that really don't belong, and also divided subjects that should have been together. The result is the creation of a madman. In 1905 Dewey was forced to resign as the State Librarian of New York due to his racist policies against hiring Jews. He was very sexist in addition to being racist - and not just your average run-of-the-mill Victorian, but enough so that even in his own day he was ridiculed for his behavior. A year after his resignation from the State Librarian position, he was scorned by his profession when he returned from an Alaskan cruise that he and a bunch of female librarians had taken after a library conference. During the cruise Dewey reportedly had his way sexually with multiple members of the passengers - one of whom ended up having a nervous breakdown as a result of it. You can read more about that in A "Private" Grievance against Dewey. by Clare Beck. in "American Libraries" 27.1 (Jan 1996): p62. After this scandal Dewey gave up being a librarian, and ended up his life selling real estate in Florida.
Of course, the Library of Congress system is not much better. It is the product of committees. When I was in Library School (I'm a professional librarian, btw), we were told by one of our instructors about how the Library of Congress system was developed. This may be apocryphal, but I doubt it. What the Library of Congress did was they started out organizing their collection they had inherited from Thomas Jefferson' personal library by the color of the book and then by size. This of course was unsatisfactory, and they went through a series of other systems before getting serious about it - due in large part to the fact that their collection had grown so huge. So they invited Melville Dewey to come appraise their collection and hopefully organize it. The meeting between Dewey and the man who was the director of the Library of Congress went horribly, though. This was in large part due to the fact that Dewey was a complete and total ass of the highest caliber. After the meeting, the director of the Library of Congress vowed he would never use Dewey's system because he could not invision ever wanting to speak to or see the man again. So instead they hired a couple of chaps named Herbert Putnam and Charles Ammi Cutter to organize the collection.
How they proceeded was that they closed the library down and then divided the collection up into 21 categories. Each category was given a separate room, and the books that belonged to each room's subject were carted in and piled up on the tables and floor. Then the library appointed a committee for each room to organize its collection - this meant that there were 21 committees working separately from each other. The committees were made up of library staff members and experts in whatever field of knowledge that subject area was concerned with. Each room was given a somewhat random letter in the alphabet, and there were certain general guidelines given to all the committees on how to organize their collections. But there was also a lot of leeway for each committee to come up with its own system. So, for example, the room that contained books on Literature (which was in the room labeled "P") were being organized by a committee made up of a few librarians and a lot of Victorian professors of literature. If you can imagine what a roomfull of Victorian literature professors was like, you would not be too surprised to find out that they reportedly got into fistfights and broke furniture over each other in their battles over which prestigious Ivy Leagued professor would have his method of organizing the subject area used. As a result of this, the "P"s in the Library of Congress system are a mess - they're the most difficult to understand, and it's almost as if they were organized by a pack of orangutans instead of "rational" human beings!
Other committees and rooms fared better, since the Literature Room was the most notorious. However, other than the fact that at the beginning of each section in the Library of Congress system is where reference and text materials are located, each of the different 21 categories is organized completely different from each other. You can't learn how one subject area is organized and expect it to be applicable for the rest of the subject areas. So we have these two major classification systems - one being the rantings of a madman, and the other the confusing product of committees. There are other aspects of these two systems I won't go into right now, but I thought I'd just share this little history with you to help enliven your journey through this project you've undertaken! Saukkomies05:26, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for that! I grew up in a DDS library (my mother was a librarian, and as a little boy I was pretty much stuck there after school, long enough to seriously warp my worldview) and the only theory that I couldn't poke holes in was "Mr. Dewey invented his system when he only had 10 randomly chosen books. If he'd had 20 or more books, the system would have been much better." -SandyJax (talk) 16:49, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for providing some fun background:) I think that as long as I have a goal to read a large enough number of books (and count the ones I've already read) it almost doesn't matter which system I use, as long as the books within each category are related. So, if Dewey has 100000 books in category 123.45 and LOC has them split in two categories X23 and Y45, I'd still eventually read some books closely related to each book in the library. The only thing that changes is the order and which specific books I would chose. --Ornil (talk) 05:37, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously not the same list of books, but probably similar list of topics. My goal is to sample, and if I read, say, 1 out of each 100000 books in LOC, I think I'll get decent coverage however they may be disrtibuted through categories. --Ornil (talk) 06:14, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yikes! I had no idea it was all such a total mess. It's interesting to see how other, more modern things such as the Internet and Wikipedia are organised. In the beginning of Internet search engines, when Yahoo was king, they had a lot of people who organised things in a heirarchical fashion - so you had science and inside that was physics and chemistry and biology...and inside physics there were a whole bunch of other categories. When the Internet was small - that made sense and the system wasn't too terrible (certainly better than the way libraries are set up). When I created my first web site, you could got to Yahoo's site and add your page into the search engine manually - and after some period of time, one of their experts would look at your page and pidgeon-hole it for you. But when the Internet went through it's first great growth spurt, it was evident that there was no way for Yahoo to employ enough people to maintain that system - and it fell into disrepair.
Google's scheme of essentially keeping a majorly cross-indexed copy of almost all of the Internet and using the connections between pages to determine which were the most important ones and which didn't matter so much for each set of search words was a technological nightmare to create (SO many computers and SO much storage) - but it works amazingly well - and you can pretty much find what you want if you have the skills to pick search terms wisely. It's interesting because the material "self-organizes".
Wikipedia is another 'self-organising' system where cross-links between articles lead you around a subject. But we also have 'Categories' and 'Projects' that add more layers of organisation that are human-driven, and also (within small subject areas) 'Navigational Templates'. This is a scheme in which the author of an article pretty much gets to decide which sections of the encyclopedia it belongs in. These seemingly anarchical systems actually work quite well if you come to the system wanting information. And of course we have the equivelent of the card catalog because we can search by title or (using the 'Contributions' link) by Author.
But these schemes (both Google and Wikipedia) rely entirely on having the entire source of all of the subject matter in computer-readable form in a bloody great database. This is why allowing some organisation to scan and OCR the entire body of human writings would be a very good thing - Google started doing that - and Amazon.com have done so too - but this needs to be a publically accessible database - owned by someone like the Library of Congress - so that everyone can have fair access to it without commercial entanglements. If we had that then we could start to apply the same kinds of techniques to organising this material - and the ISBN is all we need as an 'address' to find the book on a physical shelf. What we have now is a slightly messy scheme where the 'card index' (or at least, hopefully, the computer database equivelent of that) leads you to a LOC or Dewey number that tells you where the book resides physically on the shelves...however, that number could just be a consecutively assigned number for all that it matters.
Really, the only remaining benefit of these physical organisational systems would be that I could go to a 'bricks and mortar' library or book store - where the books are physically stored - and look up a book in the card catalog that I know relates to a specific subject - then I can walk over to the shelves and find a whole bunch of other books on the exact same subject on the shelves next to it - which occasionally turns up material I'd never have thought of reading on that topic. However, a seriously kick-ass computer system could do that too.
The OP's goal is a laudable one. Personally, I get the same kind of experience from my 3 year-long habit of clicking Wikipedias' 'Random Article' button three times before I go to bed - reading from beginning to end no matter what the three articles are...it's really quite amazing what shows up.
Wow, Steve, I'm quite impressed by that entry you wrote. It's fascinating as a librarian to see things through an IT person's eyes now and then. Good luck on finding a library in this day and age that has a card catalog anymore! But I was also impressed about your nighttime habit of reading random wiki articles. That WOULD be a good way to get an education. I got basically the same education by working as a book shelver in a university library back when I was getting my undergraduate degree. Each day I'd pick up two or three books from the book carts I was shelving to take home and read. I would necessarily read the whole book, but I would absorb the important parts and then return them. I devoured books for about four years, after which I felt like I'd really got my college education in the library and the classes I took at the college were ancillary!
The whole issue of examining how to organize knowledge is what my degree is in. I have a Masters in Library and Information Science, which means: how do we organize knowledge in such a way as to make it optimally retrievable for the end user. Some of my favorite key concepts that are basic to this are:
Relevance, which is a term to describe whether something you've retrieved from a search is what you're looking for or not. Sometimes something may be partially relevant, which actually can help in looking for more stuff. Even with the greatest software out there now using the most powerful computers around, there's still no way to even come close to approaching what the human brain can do in determining whether something is relevant or not. Along with the relevant material, Google (and all the other automated searches) provide huge amounts of un-relevant material, too. This is not only wasteful, but it impedes the process of trying to find important information in a timely fashion.
The User Need, which is a term to describe what the person who is searching for something wants. This is not always apparent at first, even to the searcher. One of the important qualities that a good reference librarian can posess is the ability to figure out what a person really wants, and not what he or she says he or she wants. This requires a high level of intuitiveness and almost psychic ability at times. It also requires a fairly good broad general education that covers many areas of knowledge. This usually involves a little mini-interview (called a Reference interview of course) in which there's a two-way exchange of information between the librarian and the patron.
Informatics is the study of how information is stored and retrieved in both biological and machine formats (biological including us humans).
It would be interesting sometime to put on a race between man and machine like the old legend of John Henry and the Steam Drill - to see who could find the most relevant hits for a list of various subject within a specific time limit. My money would be on the human, not the computer... Saukkomies20:53, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Are you saying that WITHOUT USING A SEARCH ENGINE a trained human researcher could find an arbitary piece of information on the Internet? I think that would be an impressive trick! A reference librarian WITH a search engine will obviously do better than a search engine alone (ie operated by a non-skilled person) - but the search engine is the key to the puzzle I think. SteveBaker (talk) 22:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, you're right, Steve. Looking back on this, I honestly can't remember *what* I was proposing exactly, which really bugs me since I'm too young to start having "senior moments"... Saukkomies13:32, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Rather than relying on dull indexing lists, why not try something crazier? Pick an initial and a common last name and read all the books that match that criteria. An author search for "Smith, K" on Amazon gave me books on book making, microelectric circuits, kinesiology, "economic theology", postmodernism, marketing, sports-based law, and a handbook of veterinary drugs. Among many others. Not a bad sampling, eh? I got 995 hits; I'm sure that gives you a broad coverage. Try something similar with your local library's online database and see. Matt Deres (talk) 16:34, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, I was thinking that I'd pick a small group at random (e.g. one small subcategory), but I would have the freedom to pick a book from it that I might be more likely to like. Otherwise it will be too much like work:) So the "Smith" method while interesting, is a bit suboptimal. Still, it's better than anything I'd thought of so far. --71.142.80.1 (talk) 17:09, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Why do money transfers take so long?
When I was in Eastern Europe, I got an emergency wire transfer from home in less than 24 hours. Yet when I call my bank to transfer money to an account with a different bank, they tell me it will take up to 4 working days (and it's never been less than that). Is there any technical reason why it takes so long, or is the thing about banks holding the money in order to profit from 4 days of interest true? If it is true, has anyone/organisation/government kicked up a fuss? --Kateshortforbob10:43, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A cynic would say: During those four days, the money is in neither account - so neither account accrues interest. However, the money is still at the bank, being invested in something no doubt, so they are earning interest from all of these bank transfer operations. Cheque payments are a similar thing. In this age of computers and inter-bank networking, none of these operations should take more than a few milliseconds...not days. It clearly DOESN'T take that long because I can transfer money from my bank into PayPal (which is essentially just another bank) and from PayPal to someone who sold me something on eBay - and it all happens in a matter of seconds. So when they WANT to do it quickly - they can. SteveBaker (talk) 12:10, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's certainly my impression of why certain wire transfers take so long. E-Trade almost admits as much in their literature.
I'm guessing that the emergency wire transfer had a hefty fee attached to it. If you want to pay your first bank to do a wire transfer and your second bank to accept it, then I'd imagine it can be done quickly. Banks love fees. In the US, a "regular" transfer will most likely go through the Automated Clearing House system. Back in the 1980's when I still worked at a bank, ACH processing was done by passing big reels of computer magnetic tape around by truck. While it's become more electronic, there are many relics of the old days that introduce those "up to 4 day" delays. --LarryMac | Talk14:22, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
When you do an instant transfer into PayPal, what shows up in your PayPal account isn't money, it's the promise of money. The actual transfer may take longer, and if the money doesn't show up, you could be left with a negative balance and a whole lot of trouble. --Carnildo (talk) 00:02, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the informative answers. In school, I was taught that it was all done with batch processing, which could account for the delays, but I didn't think that would still be an issue these days. Good point about the fee, LarryMac; I don't think I ever found out exactly how much it cost - probably something horrendous. I'm definitely cynical enough to believe my bank's profiting off the delay - time to start keeping it under the bed, perhaps...--Kateshortforbob23:07, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hitler
I have read Meinj Kampf, and between chapters, had to throw it across the room, before eventually just tossing it in the rubbish bin. I felt I had to do this out of anger, as throughout, interspersed with blatant lies, he keeps telling the reader over and over agian about how he is going to kill everyone, starting with retarded people, disabled people, Jews, etc. Why then, do so many puplications, inclueding wiki's article Hitler, state that he never accually said he wanted to kill every one, or to quote wiki: "Hitler never visited the concentration camps and did not speak publicly about the killing in precise terms." But he blatently did, one just needs to read his pice of... oh, sorry his book
2. If he wrote Mein Kampf, then assumed power, by being voted in, as Chancellor, before he began killing. Why are we taugh to not blame the German people for what he did? He told them, Im gonna kill 'em all then they voted him in. Are they not to balme, the previous generation that is.
Thanks Zionist12.191.136.2 (talk) 15:07, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
So if you feel a need to hate, hate the portion that voted for him; and note that in both the case of Hitler and Bush, neither got the majority of the vote when they were put in office. Unlike Hitler, Bush didn't even get a plurality in his first Presidential election. --jpgordon∇∆∇∆15:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I read Mein Kampf for the first time a couple of years ago, and I don't remember anything about killing anybody. I just now searched the book here for "kill", and found nothing. What I remember from reading it was mostly interesting and insightful political thinking (if a tad hyper-nationalistic and racist) alternating with spasms of inexplicable, bizarre anti-Jewish rhetoric. If he did mention killing the people you name, I'd sure like to know about it. Can you go to the site I linked to and cite the passages you're asking about? --Milkbreath (talk) 15:47, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
So, hands up all you American voters: Who read "George W. Bush, A Charge to Keep, (1999) ISBN 0-688-17441-8" before you did (or didn't) vote for him? If not - please explain why you would expect German voters to have read Mein Kampf before voting for Hitler (or not)? SteveBaker (talk) 17:40, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Most political autobiographies are ghostwritten; very few are written by the people who are listed as the author, although those people do provide the writers with information. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs)18:17, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well how many people had read mein kampf before voting? It is easy to decide what was the right course of action long after the event, but it would be much harder to 'predict' the events that occurred. I suspect that a large portion of the German public voted based on many things - a leader promoting a 'stronger' Germany, they may even routinely have voted for that party regardless of leader (after all many people vote Republican regardless of who leads them, just because historically that's who they support). Additionally you are reading mein kampf fully aware of what DID happen, that means your 'take' on the book (no matter how direct the statements) is tarnished by that knowledge and makes it almost impossible for you to read it from an unbiased viewpoint. 18:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
My point (from above) entirely. According to Barnes & Nobel, George W Bush's pre-presidency book has a 'Sales Rank' of 597,854 - which I think means that there are over half a million books that are more popular. There is simply no way that any significant number of voters read "A Charge to Keep" before just under half of them voted for him. So if, in 50 or 60 years time, people were to pick up this book and say "How on earth did all of those Americans vote for this guy after he wrote all this stuff?"...well, now you know. (Of course I've never read it either - but then I'm not an American voter!) So we shouldn't be at all surprised if virtually nobody read Hitlers' writings before they voted for him. I doubt that most of the people who vote for most of the candidates could tell you 5 things their candidate believes in. So if Hitler said he could fix the economy and boost the military and maybe get the trains running on time - then, yeah - people would vote for him without ever reading his book. Bear in mind, this was in an era before television - when even radio didn't have a huge market presence - and you wouldn't have a huge battery of information about the minutia of the candidate's past life as we do these days. If some journalist had read Mein Kampf and found it horrifying, it's not at all clear that the general public would have heard much about it. Not only that - but Hitler published his book AFTER he became party chairman. So if you were swayed by the party and not by the individual, it's possible you could have been swept into the enthusiasm of the thing and Hitler's undoubted personal charisma before ever reading the book. Since first impressions count - the book might not have swayed the minds of those who did actually read it. SteveBaker (talk) 19:39, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If I remember what I heard correctly, the German citizens had no other choice. Hitler eliminated political competition unitl he was the only option. The German system was flawed and Hitler took advantage. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.101.53.169 (talk) 22:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it's rather complicated - I just re-read Hitler and I'm still a little confused. As far as I can tell, the Nazi party - with Hitler leading it were the largest party (without a majority of the votes) three times running. After the last vote, they formed a coalition to get control of government - then used emergency wartime measures to keep running without further elections. So it's certainly not true that they eliminated all competition...had they done that, they'd have gotten 100% of the vote and no coalition would have been needed. Hitler himself did stand for election just once, early on - and lost - but he got second place with a fairly respectable 35% of the vote. If the German people knew what was likely to happen - they did have the opportunity to prevent it at the polls but didn't take it. I strongly recommend that you read Hitler to understand the details. SteveBaker (talk) 23:49, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's more complicated than even that, Steve. I'm sure if we got Clio over from the humanities desk she'd be able to go into it in more details, but part of it has to do with how the Weimar Reichstag functioned (allowing minority coalitions to gain extreme amounts of power), another part electioneering (von Papen's multiple calls for elections), another part the role of Hindenberg, etc. It's not as simple as saying, "Oh, the people voted him in," nor is it as simple as saying "Oh, they just took power." And most people did not assume that Hitler was going to create a dictatorship—there was the belief then, as there is now, that what a candidate says to get into power does not always reflect what they will do in power; most people seemed to have believed that Hitler would not be halfway as extreme as he came off in his speeches and writings. Anyway, my big point is that its a big, complicated question, with a lot of other things to consider than just "what people knew" and "what they voted for." And as we know from the US experience, the causality between people voting and a leader doing things is not straightforward at all; hell, people in the US can elect a new Congress with the express intent on them ending or reorganizing a war and not get it. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 00:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Answering the question, I did a report on Hitler and not many people at all read Mein Kampf before he became Chancellor. I am fairly certain it was not even widely read in Germany until 1939-1940 when he had invaded Poland. Also, Hitler was a very charismatic leader who promised to get them out of their economic failings stemming from the depression and WWI debts. The people needed someone to turn to. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sports+historyguy333 (talk • contribs) 20:02, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can't imagine many people having read it, either, but I do believe that Intelligence people in Allied countries should have, and should have been able to give their president/PM/whatever a "heads up," saying, "You might want to watch out for him, he's more racist than most in the world of 1938, and he's got some horribly anti-Jewish rhetoric that makes me question his sanity." It's the job of the Intelligence community to know if the world's leaders in major nations have written anything and figure it out.
Of course, given traditional human nature problems - inefficiency, bureaucracy, etc. - I can see how even the leaders missed that.
Not as an ordinary citizen, I'd never want to read it then. But, as I say, if I were a member of the Intelligence community (CIA), and, say, Chavez had a book out, I'd sure want to know what was in it. It would be my job.
Not only Bush but almost every American president stood for world domination(read idiocy).But Hitler was not a sensible sounding guy (I wonder whether he was atleast mentally sound) and couldnt foresee the disaster his own plans brought upon him.He was a fool to kick out all those brainy jews.Common sense is needed to achieve anything, whether it is good or bad.Bush is just a sensible Hitler over there but Hitler is Hitler.
Native Americans getting food
How do Native Americans get food these days? Heegoop, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
There's probably not too many Native Americans in Australia, but I'm pretty sure they mostly get their food from the supermarket here too. Of course, they could be eating out in restaurants and cafes. --David Broadfoot (talk) 15:53, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It depends on which Native Americans, too. Some of them, at least in Canada (although naturally we do not call them "Native Americans" here), still hunt and fish, without the seasonal restrictions or quotas that non-natives have. Adam Bishop (talk) 17:06, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think this question is pretty funny. It's like some kind of anti-joke. "Where do Native Americans get food?" "I don't know, where do Native Americans get food?" "At the grocery store, where else?" —Keenan Pepper22:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
FisherQueen: you for one should know that mini-pizzas are traditionally hunted by Esquimaux with harpoons through holes in the ice. That is why they are frozen! SaundersW (talk) 15:00, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, just because it is incorporated doesn't mean it is not non-profit (depends on the state). But in this case, according to our page on The Hunger Site, it is not a registered non-profit organization anymore, though it originally was. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:08, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The only one that even looked non-profit other than Wikipedia on that Alexa list was Craigslist but it turns out even that is technically for-profit. At #274 is Wikimedia.org. At 301 is Mozilla.org. Archive.org comes in at 345. Those are all the ones I recognized (and all of the .orgs that were legit nonprofits rather than torrent/warez sites)—not that many! --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:17, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Pictures
Can anyone recognise any of the people in these pictures? Pictures.
Grace Kelly was my first guess, but I couldn't find the exact picture on google (the rest of the pictures, another 12 that have been identified were on google images). Couldn't even find one from the same persective.
There's no way No. 2 is Paul Newman. No. 4 is definitely Franz Liszt. It's one of the most famous photos of him, and is the basis of the standard bust of his head (a large example of which I have). I also have six boxed sets of LPs of his complete piano works with that exact photo on the front (although, curiously, in one case the photo is reversed) -- JackofOz (talk) 00:20, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
legal status of mod chips
If I want to play unsigned games on my PSP, or run custom code on it or something for fun, how can Sony legally prevent me from doing that to my own device? I don't understand the law on this. So what if piracy is an obvious possibility- I still have legitimate use for it, right? Surely the business model of "if you don't pay us big bucks for the digital signature, nobody can play your game" isn't legally enforcable, right? --ffroth21:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And just to silence any murmurs of mumblemumblelegaladvicequestionremoveputintreadmillofendlessdiscussion, I don't even own a PSP, or any modern console, so this is just theoretical --ffroth22:19, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think that the DMCA is the grounds for outlawing these things. The DMCA prohibits devices designed to circumvent encryption. Since there is a decoding mechanism within the PSP (and most other game machines) that checks the code on Sony-sanctioned games and decrypts game content if and only if it's a code they recognise. So - if the Mod chip permits you to circumvent that mechanism - and thereby run unencrypted games - then (so the argument goes) you are violating the DMCA.
Personally, I find this to be a little dubious. If you are running pirated (or at least decrypted) commercial games - then, yes, you are violating the DMCA. But if you are using the Mod Chip only to play "unsigned" games that were legally obtained WITHOUT decryption - then I don't see that there should be a legal problem. The difficulty is that the DMCA is (arguably) overly broad - and it bans these devices regardless of how they are used.
It is something of a grey area though. I have a "mod chip" for my Nintendo DS (Games'N'Music - actually it's just a cartridge - you don't actually have to open the case to use it). It doesn't have a means to copy encrypted games - it just lets you use your DS as an MP3 player, a photo viewer and to play unsigned games. (I've written some games for it - it works really nicely). I don't believe the gadget I have is illegal under the DMCA - but I Am Not A Lawyer...so I could be wrong about that.
Clearly (as you say) the console manufacturers are not keen on these gadgets - they have a vested interest in you only playing signed games (because they take a cut of the profits from every game sold) - and games manufacturers don't mind it too much because while it makes their games a little more costly, it's a level playing field for all manufacturers and it keeps out the cheap/free games - which means they sell more product. The Mod chip makers claim that console manufacturers should be happy because this business sells more consoles - but that's a specious argument because consoles are almost always sold at a net loss, with the plan being to make up the difference (plus some profit) from the proceeds from the sale of signed games. If someone buys a console and never buys any signed games for it - then that's a total lossage for the console manufacturer.
One word of warning - some console manufacturers have created ways to detect that you are using a mod chip - and they'll kick you off their online services if they find out that you have one installed. (The gadget I have for the DS doesn't suffer that problem because you have to unplug it's little cartridge whenever you play a signed game.) There are rumors that they have means to remotely 'brick' your console if you use a mod chip - although I'm not aware of any of them invoking this power - so maybe it's apochryphal.
But of course the DMCA doesn't prohibit decryption specifically; it prohibits the disabling or circumvention of "copy protection devices". So it prohibits both much more and much less than mere decryption.
Ethically (and I suppose I should insert, IMHO), there's nothing whatsoever wrong with using a console you've legitimately purchased to play a game you've legitimately purchased.
Practically, as Steve Baker has already described, the console makers can't afford to let you run games which they haven't licensed, because otherwise they can't recoup the loss they sold you the console at.
Me, I believe that if they're foolish enough to sell consoles at a loss, that's their problem, not mine. But of course, they don't care if they look foolish, they care about only one thing: whether they can make a profit. Profit is the end, and the business model is the means to the end, and if the business model is deliciously attractive but fundamentally flawed, that isn't necessarily a fatal flaw, especially if we can rewrite the rules.
There's not (yet) a law on the books which prevents circumventing a business model -- though there are plenty of companies who clearly, dearly wish there were. And they've almost gotten their wish, because the DMCA is easy to interpret pretty broadly, and plenty of companies are playing it like a fine old fiddle. Since it prohibits much more than decryption -- namely, anything which can be defined as a circumvention device, and where you also have pretty wide latitude in defining what's a "copy protection" device that an allegedly-illegal device circumvents -- it's often the case that a company can do pretty much whatever it wants here, as long as it's got more money to spend on lawyers than the do the few stubborn misfits who believe they ought to be able to do whatever they want with this new device they just bought.
Printer manufacturers who sell printers at a loss and intend to recoup the loss through sale of ink cartridges face precisely the same problem, and they've used precisely the same law with precisely the same results -- i.e., partial but pretty significant success, in utter defiance of logic or conventional ethics.
Me, I circumvent the whole sordid can of worms by not playing console games and not using inkjet printers. But I pity the people who have to, because it is indeed a sordid, logic-defying utter mess. —Steve Summit (talk) 16:46, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Antique Candy Box
We have a round, cardboard box about 4 inches in diameter and 4 inches high. It has a metal lid with a glass covering a lithographed scene showing French flags, crowd of men holding numbered sticks and a spinner wheel with numbers. A plunger on the side of the cover will cause the spinner to rotate. Obviously a gaming device of some sort. Decals on side of box indicate French or Portugese connection. Did any one ever hear of such? If so we would like to hear from you. Thanks for you time. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.252.49.134 (talk) 22:41, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
How tightly should a pair of thin leather gloves, like those used for driving and by murderers in movies, fit one's hands? Should one be able to comfortably form a tight fist? Or should the gloves stretch to near its maximum when a fist is formed? Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 22:51, 14 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's a question of your personal preference, isn't it? Continuing with your hypothetical role in a movie, you might want a different fit for doing the safe-cracking than you'll want for just strolling around town afterwards spending your loot; a tight fit first, a looser fit later.
Wearing gloves that are too tight might cause burns, discomfort or inability to operate swiftly with the hand, as can of course wearing gloves that are too loose. --Ouro (blah blah) 18:55, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A little loosely. You should, indeed, be able to do almost anything with your hand that you can do without the glove, and that being so you will be able to get the gloves on and off without any trouble. If you have your gloves made to measure, they will fit like a glove. Xn404:13, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm looking for FREE or very CHEAP satellite/birds-eye aerial photography of Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. (GoogleEarth is great, but to license the image for the use I want it for would cost hundreds of dollars). Are any of you sleuths able to locate any? The NASA imagery looked too low-res for my purposes. It doesn't have to be super-high res as a whole, but you the camp should be easily visible and centered in the view at about 720X480 resolution. Thanks. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 02:38, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Um no? Talk to one of your fellow terrorists. I'm sure the US military isn't in the business of making high-res aerial photos of its military installations available "for FREE or very CHEAP". --ffroth05:29, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Har har. I just need as high res as is already easily available on Google Earth but with easier licensing schemes. It ain't exactly secret stuff. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:33, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There are tons of satellite images from the MODIS sensors of the Terra and Aqua satellites at MODIS Rapid Response website. Click the "Real-time" link at the top for the main gallery and archive. Learning how to use the website and find images of a specific place takes some time, and even then there's a good chance the site will be covered by clouds. Still, the satellites scan practically the whole planet repeatedly on a fairly quick cycle. The images are far larger than 720x840 pixels. The maximum resolution of the imagery is 250 meters per pixel. The website contains enormous amounts of imagery, perhaps you can find what you want there. Be warned though, the imagery is fairly "raw" and unprocessed. I'm sure there is imagery there that contains Guantanamo, but it may take some effort to learn how to find the correct images in the huge archive, and then some time to wade through them to find something without clouds or scanner distortion. Plus, I have no idea if a 250 meter per pixel resolution will be good enough to see much. In any case, it is a great website for satellite images. Looking at the imagery there you quickly realize that the vast majority of the planet at any particular time is either ocean, ice, or covered with clouds. Pfly (talk) 06:21, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that will work, unfortunately. Not only is 250m/pixel resolution not high enough to see much of anything, but they don't seem to cover eastern Cuba, just western. Ah well. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:07, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Check www<dot>cryptome<dot>org they have lots of that sort of stuff.
Water depth safety
An area university recently installed a new pool with a novel feature: a rock climbing wall that extends out of the pool, the idea being that no safety equipment is needed because anyone who falls will simply fall back into the water. This seems like a bad idea to me. Notwithstanding the possibility of hitting the wall on the way down when falling, or the chance of hitting someone else in the water at the bottom, the wall extends 12 feet out of the water and is surrounded by 7-foot-deep water. Is that even a safe depth for that height, especially if someone reaches the top and then decides to dive off? I've been unable to find any height/water depth safety charts online. Newsboy85 (talk) 05:58, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If the height is 12 feet over 7 feet of water there is plenty to dive into. And if it is only 12 feet and clearly visible I should think people could be trusted to care for themselves and watch out. After all people "bomb" into pools, and we know we need to watch for that. An issue where Health & Safety has already been well and truly satisfied I should think. My pool has a 10 metre diving board and nobody has ever been struck by a diver.86.219.161.6 (talk) 11:20, 15 December 2007 (UTC)dt[reply]
How far do these "rocks" extend? Every climbing wall that I've ever seen only has handholds that stick out maybe 1-2 inches. If the person falling off the wall pushes away from it even a little as they fall, they should have no problem at all of clearing the wall. Dismas|(talk)13:08, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What!?! They haven't placed sharks in the water below the wall? What ARE they thinking?
Of course, the real hardcore way to find this answer would be to find the Standard that covers diving platforms in swimming pools. Standards are NOT (repeat NOT) going to be found online anywhere because they are sold to institutions (engineering firms, government agencies, libraries, etc.) for a profit, and placing them online for free access would be very much a violation of their copyright. So, to find the correct standard, you're going to need to contact some place that has the standard you're looking for, such as a library connected with a university that offers degrees in engineering and related fields. However, there are not too many libraries around that will have ALL the standards in the world in their collection. It's a matter of money - why pay for standards that nobody will use ever? So even though you may find a library that has standards in its reference collection, this doesn't mean they're going to have the standard you're looking for.
To get you pointed in roughly the right direction, there is an online service that also sells standards that allows one to search for standards. However, its search engine is horrible to use unless you know precisely what the standard is called that you want. Anyway, the name of this database is "ILI Standards Infobase Online". Here's their URL: http://www.ili-info.com
I did a search in ILI and came up with a standard that may cover what you're looking for. However, I have some bit of doubt about it, since it seems to be a standard that is accepted internationally in Europe, but I can't tell whether it is accepted in the U.S. or not... At any rate, the standard is "EN 13451-4 : SWIMMING POOL EQUIPMENT - PART 4: ADDITIONAL SPECIFIC SAFETY REQUIREMENTS AND TEST METHODS FOR STARTING PLATFORMS." Released: 02/01/2001. Published by CEN:COMITE EUROPEEN DE NORMALISATION, BRUXELLES, BELGIUM. This is the English language version of that standard (hence the "EN" at the beginning of the standard's number), and is just one of a series of standards that are about swimming pools. If the information you're looking for is not in this standard, it may be in one of the other standards of this series.
So good luck. This would be where you'd go to get THE DEFINITIVE ANSWER to your question. If you find the correct applicable standard for something, it will be upheld in a court of law should any lawsuit arise. If the swimming pool you're talking about does not meet the standard's requirements, then they will be held responsible for any mishap. If they DO meet the standard, then they've covered their ass. Saukkomies12:52, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think you'll find the "EN" stands for "euro norm" or European standard, rather then "English" - I've seen the standard named as BS EN 13451-4, DIN EN 13451-4, NEN-EN 13451-4, and SS-EN 13451-4 (British Standard, Deutsche Industrie Norm, Nederlands Normalisatie-instituut, Svensk Standard). In any case, if you look here you'll find the page where the American National Standards Institute will sell you a copy of the standard for $55. -- Arwel (talk) 20:17, 15 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I can't say whether this setup violates any rules or regulations, but reading about this is setting off all kinds of alarm bells in my mind. Multiple wet slippery teenagers simultaneously attempting to rock-climb with the self-assurance that comes at that age combined with the "knowledge" they their fall will be safe. Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. Matt Deres (talk) 23:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Absolutely. The contralto voice overlaps the tenor range, and some contraltos even compete with baritones. Sir Thomas Beecham said of Dame Clara Butt that on a fine day her voice could be heard across the English Channel. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There are a few all-female a cappella groups, such as Zap Mama or The Mint Juleps (UK-based, no article), where one member sings the bass part. Of course they don't go as deep as John Mills, but it works well as a bass line. There have been a couple of female jazz vocalists with deep voices too, Carmen McRae and Cassandra Wilson for example, but even Sarah Vaughan sometimes sang really low notes, and so did Yma Sumac, in her grotesque and unforgettable fashion. And Cher often sang lower than Sonny in their duets. ---Sluzzelintalk03:34, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking as a contralto in an all-female a capella group, yes. :) I'm not a remarkable one, but through this sort of involvemet I'm definitely in a position to have heard some, and holy cow. One of our girls is basically a tenor. --Masamage♫01:44, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Question is this:" Does this really work ?!" It also has tips about labor unions and certain "Animal Rights" organizations, such as PETA, ALF, and other Eco-Terrorist groups. 205.240.146.37 (talk) 02:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There used to be until last year a very fascinating publishing company called Loompanics based out of Washington state that published books on all kinds of topics, including a number of them on how to change one's identity, etc. Paladin Press has said they'll pick up some of Loompanics titles, but I am not sure which ones these are. You might be able to find used Loompanics books on E-Bay or in used and rare bookstores.
Another source for this sort of thing is the magazine published in Oregon called Green Anarchy.
As far as telling you that "this really works", I'm afraid I am not going to do that. My interest in this subject is one of curiosity, and although Loompanics has books that talk about doing illegal or quasi-illegal things, I would never myself do any of them, and would never advise someone else to do them either. If you want to know whether it is really possible to dissappear, just look at some cases like Theodore Kaczynski the Unabomber, or Warren Jeffs the polygamist outlaw, or others who tried to assume fake identities and dissappear. If The Man wants you, you're probably not going to be able to hide forever. Although there have been some people who have gotten away with it for a very long time, such as the fascinating story of Kathleen Soliah, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who dissappeared and became a soccer mom in Minnesota until the authorities finally caught up with her almost 25 years later. She's now serving time in prison. Saukkomies04:31, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A major difficulty, of course, is that as time goes on information about people becomes more and more interconnected into centralized databases. 100 years ago you could move to another state and have a reasonably good chance of passing off a new name and identity; today every little thing you try to do—get a job, get a credit card, open up a bank account, buy a plane ticket, etc.—requires multiple forms of identification, bureaucratic numbers (social security, for example), and having all sorts of information (tax, consumer, etc.) plugged into big ol' databases that could hypothetically be used to triangulate an identity even if the name wasn't the same at all. Anyway, I've just skimmed the article, but the basic message seems to be "be totally paranoid, all the time, and always feel like you are on the run," which sounds about right to me. The second you want to do something like settle down, stop running, get a steady income, see family and friends, etc., that's when you're going to get nabbed. Being on the run does not sound like something that most people could pull off for any amount of time; it requires a LOT of work. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 15:18, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't trawled through all the stuff at that website, but it looks like it's mostly rubbish with a bit of common sense thrown in. Thousands of people disappear without trace every year, and no doubt a proportion of those are deliberate. As long as you have plenty of cash and don't do anything like buy property, fly, or run a business or a car, and don't ever want to see friends or family again, it should be very easy.--Shantavira|feed me15:32, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I read a fair chunk of it - I'd be very surprised if the person or people writing it actually know any of those things for sure. It seemed like a bunch of random ideas culled from a couple of dozen movie scripts rather than anything real. SteveBaker (talk) 20:36, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And a fair amount of CSI. But yeah, I think the real problem in "disappearing" has nothing to do with licking stamps and wearing a hat indoors. If they know enough to suspect you of being someone else, to the point where they'd take the time to do forensic checks, then you've already screwed up. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:21, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I actually have the Loompanics "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found". One of the central hints in the book is that it is much, much, much easier to disappear from the wife and in-laws that from The Man. Maintaining the new identity is partly a function of how badly someone wants to find you. A pissed off ex- might spend a couple of grand on a private eye and they'll likely find you if you didn't know what you were doing, but might fail if you're careful or lucky. All that changes if you are WANTED. You can't change your DNA or your fingerprints and there are all kinds of supercomputers buzzing back and forth trying to make matches work out. Unless you're planning on living off the land as a hermit out where nobody would care to look, you're eventually going to get connected (and busted). The first step in successfully disappearing is to not have too many people looking for you in the first place. Matt Deres (talk) 00:08, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
BRAIN DRAIN
Does LSD "melt your brain"? I have heard this a lot and wanted to know if it is true and what it really does. Not neccesarily just to your perosnality, but to your "smarts" or maybe even yopur abiltiy to perceive. I haev also heard that it makes you start becoming mentally retarded and causes brain damage. Is this true? Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.79.10 (talk) 02:51, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Have you tried reading the article Lysergic acid diethylamide? There's a whole section on "Effects". In my experience, no, it doesn't "melt" your brain, or make you stupid, but you can become very confused on it, and if you have too much, especially in combination with other drugs, you may stay that way for years. It can also complicate pre-existing mental health conditions, which is nothing to sneeze at. There have certainly been intelligent and talented people who stayed that way after taking lots of LSD, and there have been other people who were pretty damaged by their experiences with the drug. -GTBacchus(talk)03:12, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
90% consume, 9% do bits of work, and 1% do most of the work
What's the principle, which applies to Wikipedia amongst many voluntary-type things, whereby the vast majority of people only make use of what others have produced, the majority of the remainder only do a little of the work, and almost all the work is done by a tiny number of people?
Are there any statistics of this principle as regards Wikipedia?
A total of 187 million edits have ever been made to Wikipedia, of those:
6 people have made more than 100,000 edits.
11 people have made more than 90,000 edits.
18 people have made more than 80,000 edits.
31 people have made more than 70,000 edits.
56 people have made more than 60,000 edits,
88 people have made more than 50,000 edits,
147 people have made more than 40,000 edits,
282 people have made more than 30,000 edits,
648 people have made more than 20,000 edits,
1860 people have made more than 10,000 edits,
...and more than 4000 people made more than 5,000 edits.
We have 6 million registered users - and an unknown number of anonymous users who also edit, but I'd guess that there must be at least another 6 million. An awful lot of edits seem to come from people without accounts. So let's guess that we have 12 million editors altogether. So we should probably guess that the average number of edits per user is probably about 15.
Conclusions:
(Rough figures)
The top ten editors alone made over 1.8 million edits, so one millionth of the editors made 1% of the edits.
The top 2000 editors made close to 18 million edits, so one six thousandth of the editors made 10% of the edits.
The average number of edits per person is probably around 15...but the typical number of edits per person is probably a lot less.
So it's clear that a very large fraction of the edits are made by a ridiculously small fraction of the editors. However, because we don't have statistics for the distribution of edit counts for everyone - and we don't know how many anonymous users there are, it's impossible to count how much work is being done at the bottom end. Worse still, there are automated edits made by 'bots' who don't appear in the list above - but do count into the total 187 million edits, it's possible that the "majority" of the work is being done automatically. Also, a lot of the users are doing "negative work" - vandalizing, putting junk into the articles, starting articles about themselves...all sorts of things that count as "edits" but don't help. For some very popular articles (eg "Computer" before it was semi-protected), 90% of the edits are vandalism or vandalism reversion. Lots of people (many of the people here for example) make "edits" that are not directly related to the encyclopedia itself but to the 'support system' - policy and guidelines, admin, reference desks, help desks, the Wikipedia 'newspaper' and so on.
That article is horribly wrong. It's clearly more than a year out of date because the web site posted it in September of 2006 - but even back then, it had to be off by a mile. It says: "50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people"...Well, if 524 is 0.7% then "the people" is 75,000 people. But there are currently six million user accounts on Wikipedia...and even as long as a year ago, there must have been a LOT more than 75,000. Furthermore, if you add up the numbers today, the top 500 people are responsible for about 16 million edits between them. That's less than 10% - certainly nowhere near 50%. That article was published in September 2006 - but it must have been written based on statistics from back in 2002 or so for there to have been only 75,000 accounts. SteveBaker (talk) 20:14, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Huh. Would you disagree with the writer's conclusion in general, that a lot of content is contributed by IPs and then edited and formatted heavily by regulars? -GTBacchus(talk)22:45, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, given that we know that the basic facts in the article are either wrong - or very, very out of date - I'm not inclined to believe any conclusions that might be based on those incorrect/outdated facts. If you know of sources of up-to-date statistics that prove this then let's hear it. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I haven't got the statistics, but I feel that I've observed the dynamic the author describes in that article. I was just asking in my last post whether you've also made that observation; or perhaps you're suspending judgment on that point until you see some better statistics? -GTBacchus(talk)19:24, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Note that number of "edits" is not necessarily a good measure. There is a big difference between small edits and major writing. I recall reading not too long ago that only a few dozen editors were responsible for most of the content (discounting bots, discounting typo fixing, discounting edit wars and user pages). But I can't remember where I read that. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:19, 16 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Certainly you're right about that. There are plenty of editors who simply treat Wikipedia as a chat site - or engage solely in politics and never do much "productive" editing - and there are those who provide valuable contributions in places like these Reference Desks - but don't add much content to articles. So, yeah - it's possible that we have some skew in those numbers because of that. Also, we can't really tell which edits are valuable and which aren't. If someone corrects a minor grammar infraction by changing one word, is that as "valuable" as someone who corrects the average litter size of a European Red Squirrel from 6 (wrong) to 4 (correct) by changing one character? Even huge contributions of entire sections of text may not be as valuable as the addition of a key reference for a possibly dubious fact. We can't measure those values - so we have no possible way to guess at the "value" of IP contributors, logged in contributors and the very frequent contributors. So - we have to fall back on edit counts or something like that. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it's not impossible to come up with a methodology on "valuable" edits, if you assume that "valuable" edits persist (in a Darwinian fashion) longer than those which are not valuable. If you had the whole database on your machine, and built a program which could crunch the numbers, I bet you could break it down even further. (That would be a heck of a more interesting PhD thesis than the endless number of people petitioning administrators to take their "is editing Wikipedia exciting?" on a 7-point scale from "yes" to "no" pointless data gathering quizzes.) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As I said, it depends on your definition of "valuable". The problem with the approach you suggest is that a simple grammar or spelling fix may well last a long time - but it's not as "valuable" (at least not in my view) as a factual correction. If an article has an obvious spelling mistake, that doesn't devalue the article by much - but if you have the wrong birth date for George Bush (or whatever) then the fix for that is incredibly valuable. Both fixed may stay around for a long time - but you can't automatically determine which was a valuable fix and which a less valuable one. Worse still, if you fix the president's birthday but it's embedded in a grammatically poor sentence - then your fix for the birthday may well show up in your survey as being "short lived" if someone comes along and rewrites the sentence to fix the grammar. That's actually a pretty common pattern because when person 'A' fixes a date, it tends to cause person 'B' (who is patrolling the article for vandalism, etc) will look at that change to verify that it's a good one - and in the process may notice a grammatical error that's been there for months in that very same sentence. If person B then fixes that then person A's edit is "erased" (as far as your statistical software is concerned) and therefore devalued. This kind of thing happens all the time. You get an article that's been sitting there with no changes for months - then someone will make one tiny change and it'll cause a cascade of other improvements that can last for several days as editors who are merely patrolling the article are provoked into giving it another look.
Take for example, the Red Squirrel article (I picked it out of the air - it happens to be the first article I ever edited on Wikipedia - before I even registered a username).
The article is only edited rather sporadically - it sometimes goes for months without changes. It happened to be mentioned in response to a question on the Science Reference Desk here on Dec 8th. The article had not been edited for nearly two weeks prior to that. But the consequence of that one mention was that our very own User:Milkbreath evidently read the article for the first time - saw that it could use some cleanup - and made a dozen reasonable-looking copy-edits to the article. Mostly minor stuff - all pretty valid. A large number of revisions were to de-capitalise the words "Red Squirrel" to "red squirrel" - the article originally having a messy mixture of the two capitalisation styles. This caused User:UtherSRG (a long time editor of that article) to revert everything Milkbreath did (rather heavy-handedly, I might say!)...but a day later UtherSRG evidently thought more carefully about it and went back and made a whole bunch of copy-edits to consistantly have "Red Squirrel" instead of an ugly mixture of the two. Milkbreath goes in again the following day and de-capitalises them. UrtherSRG reverts. This activity in the article evidently wakes up a patroller of the article and User:Fluri enters the scene - reverting UrtherSRG and thereby putting back all of Milkbreaths changes. Fluri explains in the edit summary for the reversion that the Wikipedia Manual of Style says that Milkbreath is right (Yeaaah! Go Team Ref Desk!)...and the debate ends there.
Now, tell me - who made the "valuable contribution"? How is your statistical software going to spot that Milkbreath's contribution "stuck" and not award points for the changes to Fluri? Fluri's only real contribution was in pursuading UrtherSRG that Milkbreath was right - and all of the value of Fluri's contribution was in the edit summary "These changes follow the WP:MOS -- Surely this is not a case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT". So Milkbreath did the grunt work - but Fluri made it stick. UrtherSRG isn't a bad editor - he/she simply didn't know the WP:MOS rule for naming animal species - but those dozen good-faith edits that UrtherSRG made on the basis of a misunderstanding will count for nothing - no more than vandalism would. So who gets credit?
Edit counts are not a perfect measure of "value of contribution" - but anything short of a detailed article-by-article review isn't going to be any better.
My point was not to argue that this was a totally rigorous solution, but that it would be much more valuable than just edit counts. In any case, you'd obviously have to write something clever enough to distinguish revert wars from regular edits in order to properly attribute authorship. I don't think that aspect would be that hard. But again, I think any real metric would be looking at the bulk of content and the persistence of its existence. To try and hash out the factual validity of the content would be a totally different question, a different one than the initial one about who edits Wikipedia. I respectfully disagree that you couldn't do any better than edit counts in terms of statistical number crunching. Edit counts will tell you that a bot is the best Wikipedia editor ever; an analysis of the type I suggested would instead indicate that a (human) editor who wrote lots of content that survived for a long time was a better editor than a bot. And I think that would be meaningful, even if it doesn't capture every nuance of editing and edit wars on Wikipedia. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or in this case, the better. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:46, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And of course the number of edits is much less important than the value.Someone who has made only a couple of hundred edits-all them helpful,productive and useful-is in my opinion more of an asset to Wikipedia than someone who has made 10,000 edits,most of which are inserting garbage,arguing with other editors and pointless edit wars.
Lemon martini (talk) 11:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I did a bit of poking around, and I'm starting to think that there wasn't much in the way of meteorological record-keeping going on there then. If you really mean "climate", I'd say the chances are good that it was a lot like it is now, perhaps a little cooler. Whether 1779 was an unusual weather year I haven't been able to find out. --Milkbreath (talk) 16:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I've tried searching on Google, but wasn't able to find a clear answer or tutorial. When looking a a lens like the "Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.6" how does one read that orally?
I'll answer this point by point. I'd pronounce it "Sigma seventeen to seventy millimeters, eff two point eight to four point six." Sigma is the brand name.
As well, what does that focal range mean? Does the lower measurement indicate the closest point that it can focus on and the latter refer to the farthest point it can focus to?
No, the numbers refer to the focal length. When a range is given, that means it's a zoom lens. When you zoom in all the way, it's a 70 mm lens (which is a medium-telephoto, as a "normal" lens is about 50 mm); when you zoom out all the way, it's a 17 mm (wide-angle).
What does it mean when the aperture is in a range like "2.8-4.6"? Does that mean the user can manually adjust the aperture opening? Or does it mean that at the 17mm point, it will be f2.8, and at 70mm f.4.6?
All normal camera lenses allow you to adjust the aperture. The numbers given refer to the widest (lowest-numbered) aperture, which for zoom lenses can vary with the focal length. Your second interpretation is correct, but refers to the widest aperture possible. At 17 mm you might be able to adjust it from f/2.8 to f/22; at 70 mm, only from f/4.6 to f/22.
--Anonymous, 04:35 UTC, December 17, 2007.
See Focal length for your first question. Basically it's the "zoom" of normal point-and-shoots, changes the size of the subject. Are you using this on a Nikon? On DX sensors the focal length is 1.5 times that, as the sensor is smaller (see crop factor). The kit lens (18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 / 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6) that come with the camera is more than enough for normal use, and since the lens worth much more than the camera in 10 years time, I would suggest you to get original Nikkor/Canon lenses. They cost more now, but will sell for far more in the future than 3rd party brands. --antilivedT | C | G04:48, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
On DX sensors the focal length is 1.5 times that, as the sensor is smaller. Not so. The focal length remains the same, and thus the depth of field is unaffected. (The angle of field is reduced.) ¶ I would suggest you to get original Nikkor/Canon lenses. They cost more now, but will sell for far more in the future than 3rd party brands. It's likely that they will sell for more, yes. Let's call this price difference "Y". And let's call the price difference now (and in the other direction) "X". If Y>X, then (putting aside a number of other matters) you'd be wise to get the expensive brand. However, I see no strong reason to believe that Y>X. Maybe it will be, maybe it won't; I expect the notion is one that toy buyers tell themselves, their friends and their significant others in order to justify their expenses. Actually I doubt that many of today's lenses will sell for much ten years from now, because they seem so flimsy. (Of course, some seem flimsy but aren't, and some don't even seem flimsy.) Remember that if you can forgo autofocus you actually have a lot of options for most digicam bodies or anyway longer focal lengths -- some very surprising, e.g. Hexanon AR mount lenses on "Four Thirds" bodies. -- Hoary (talk) 09:07, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I should've put "effective focal length" in there yes, but the selling older lenses is OR (which is allowed on RD), off-brand lenses sell for much much less than original lenses on auction sites. Also, I see no reason in getting that lens instead of the 18-55mm VR: it's only 1 stop faster, and offers marginally better macro (but still not exactly macro), but at ~US$400 it's almost double the price of the 18-55mm VR. Sure you lose 15mm in the tele side but you will hardly eve use it anyway, and VR will beat the Sigma in low light (don't tell me you're gonna use the Sigma for sports). The $200 you save can get you a Nikon 70-300mm G, while not a spectacular tele it's well worth its money, or a flash, which will improve indoor pictures drastically by using bounced flash. --antilivedT | C | G10:36, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I was wondering if any one had more info on this. Now that the scientist have been given a bit of time, I was wondering if they knew what had caused the illness in so many and also any other interesting info. I am surprised that the wikinews article is so short. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.191.136.3 (talk) 16:54, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
It's perfectly possible for a meteorite to contain all sorts of heavy metals and other nasty things. Generally, the rock smacks into the ground and throws up a lot of dust and dirt - but the meteorite itself stays pretty much intact. The difference here is claimed to be that because of the high altitude, the rock was still very hot and hadn't slowed down or cooled down as much as would one hitting the ground at sea level - hence more of whatever nastiness was inside got vaporized and spewed out into the air. Arsenic poisoning is claimed to be the cause - and what I see of the reported illnesses seems to match our description in "Arsenic poisoning" for a relatively mild dose that's been inhaled. SteveBaker (talk) 18:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The nastiness wasn't inside; the water there had high levels of arsenic which was presumably released by the application of one hot lump of rock. The meteorite just supplied the heat, not the poison. Matt Deres (talk) 21:36, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
God Still Loves Us
It appears to be some sort of campaign, but for what? I saw it plastered all over I am Legend, but I was aware of it before - it appears to be some sort of sticker/poster/graffiti thing. What is it about? Mr. Raptor (talk) 18:36, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
In the movie, all of humanity is basically wiped out by a man-made virus - it is perhaps unsurprising that people would have turned to religion and said that God still loves us (...despite the terrible mess we just made.) SteveBaker (talk) 18:43, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
and I seem to be having a problem, when i press three keys simulaneously the letters zkf appear.
for example if I was to press the keys ; A, S, D at the same time , they would appear
but along with Z, K , F
just like sadzkf, this can become extremely annoying whilst typing, can anybody help me out? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.142.88.7 (talk) 19:04, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Most keyboards nowadays do not support a combination of 3 or more alphabetical keys to be pressed at the same time, in order to save costs. Usually you won't be able to press 3 keys at precisely the same time and so it's still recognisable, but the keyboard controller might have gotten confused once you hold down the three keys, spewing out other letters in addition to what you've typed. --antilivedT | C | G21:31, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Since I am not sure which ref desk geography fits into, I have a question about reading longitude and latitude. Specifically, is a location A (54°42' N 25°16' E) east of B (54°05' N 25°18' E)? The location is in Europe, if it matters. Visual confirmation is impossible even on Google Maps, since the line is almost vertical and as such human eye cannot be a reliable judge. PS. If my understanding of this is correct it is east, but I'd like a confirmation - thank you. --Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk 20:22, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You can ignore the north portion of the co-ordinates in this instance. 25:18E is further east than 25:16E by definition -- and you could draw a true north-south line (at 25:17E) down in between them that would touch neither. (That said, of course, point A IS east of point B if you take the extreme long way around...) Faithfully, Deltopia (talk) 20:35, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
B is east of A. Ignore the latitude and just look at the longitude, 25°16' vs. 25°18' E. These numbers are the number of degrees and minutes east of the Prime Meridian. There are 60 minutes in each degree. The numbers go up as one goes east (if the longitude was labeled "W" instead of "E" it would be reversed). So you can say that location B is east of A by two minutes of longitude. Note that the precise distance of a degree or minute of longitude changes depending on the latitude. Pfly (talk) 20:40, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This is assuming that when you say "east of", you mean "farther east than". The context of your question suggests that you do, so that's fine, but I thought it should be made explicit. Without such a context I would ordinarily say that point A was north of B, or if it was necessary to be more precise, north and a little west. --Anonymous, 05:48 UTC, December 18, 2007.
a tv show
i remember that there was this tv show about this guy that would go into this big tiger robot thing and fought other robots. He got these different upgrades, like one of them was these blue things that made him super fast, and another green upgrade thing that made him strong. He had a team of 3, and one of his partners rode a dinosaur robot. I think it was called zodiac, but i'm not completely sure. It used to be on toonami all the time. if anyone can hellp me i would appreciate it a lot, thanx.--Dlo2012 (talk) 21:28, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
This question has been removed. Per the reference desk guidelines, the reference desk is not an appropriate place to request medical, legal or other professional advice, including any kind of medical diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment recommendations. For such advice, please see a qualified professional. If you don't believe this is such a request, please explain what you meant to ask, either here or on the Reference Desk's talk page.
This question has been removed. Per the reference desk guidelines, the reference desk is not an appropriate place to request medical, legal or other professional advice, including any kind of medical diagnosis or prognosis, or treatment recommendations. For such advice, please see a qualified professional. If you don't believe this is such a request, please explain what you meant to ask, either here or on the Reference Desk's talk page. --~~~~
I'm pretty sure I know the answer to this, but I thought I'd ask.
I watch almost no TV. It had been about 2 weeks since tiehr TV in my house was on - one cable ready one 5 years old and cable ready, one 20-22 years old that is from when I was in college. But, yesterday I decided to wrap presents and watch the blizzard game in Cleveland.
For about a minute, every screen except the public access channel showed a horizontal, colored line test pattern on the cable tready one, which had taken a moment to come on. I turned it off and went into my bedroom with the other one; same story, except in flipping around channels after a moment a few at the lower end (2-5 or so) were the only ones to come on, and, even those were really fuzzy. (Except for public access, which still came on.) Then, finally, the channel I wanted came on. The one in the living room then worked perfectly when I went back and turned it on.
I'm thinking this was becasue of the switch, but am not sure. Could the TVs both have been "looking" for the signal, but just responded in different ways because of the age of the technology - cable ready coming back right away if I'd waited a moment longer, 20-year-old one taking longer? Or, could the bad storm have knocked out the receivers? I doubt it's the latter, becasue stations are in diverse parts of the area.63.3.19.129 (talk) 23:23, 17 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The cable company receives signals from one or more antennas and retransmits them over the cable. The storm must have knocked out something in their system, so they were unable to do this. This is confirmed because only the public access channel, which originates at the cable company itself, was unaffected. Then they fixed the problem and you got your channels back. Maybe not all at once, depending on exactly what happened; but if you'd had both sets turned on at once, you would have seen the same thing on both sets. (One possible exception: if there are strong local stations on some channels, either TV might or might not be capable of receiving them, perhaps badly, without its own antenna or cable. This might account for variations in those specific channels.) --Anonymous, 05:58 UTC, December 18, 2007.
It depends what they are testing you for! According to their FAQ Animal Pak is fine for competitive weight lifters though it does advise you "check with your governing body as each has a different set of rules." I would check with a doctor, nutritionist or, at the very least, a coach before risking taking supplements that could be illegal for your sport of choice. Rockpocket03:13, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Crossdressing confusion
After seeing girls crossdressing as guys being used as a plot in fiction (eg. Hana-Kimi) I was wondering how the storylines would work in the real world... say a pretty girl cuts her hair short and successfully disguises herself as a boy, and another guy who is straight becomes attracted to her, without knowing she's really a girl, would this make the guy gay? Or would the girl be giving off subconscious signals that she's female? --Candy-Panda (talk) 12:25, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
No single attraction makes a person gay or straight. Practically everyone experiences attractions to both genders at one time or another, and an awful lot of people act on those attractions even when they aren't consistent with their general sexual orientation. If you're gay, you're gay, even if you sometimes think a girl is hot. If you're straight, you're straight, even if you check out a guy from time to time. If you think of yourself as straight, but you find that you are more attracted to guys than girls, or that you can't perform with a girl unless you're pretending she's a guy, that's when you should start reevaluating your straightness. As for the crossdressing; lots of people find androgynes attractive; I know I sure do. Male or female, gay or straight, if you find Jaye Davidson attractive, all that means is that you have working eyes and a functional libido. -FisherQueen (talk · contribs)13:07, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I believe it's in your DNA. There is nothing that will turn a previously straight guy into a gay guy. That said, straight or gay is not something black and white - there's a awful lot of grey inbetween. A lot of young adults are unsure of their sexuality and it can take a while to decide where their preference lies. However, due to social or peer pressure, someone may hide their sexuality for a long while, and sometimes forever. Astronaut (talk) 02:07, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You're basically asking if being confused or tricked about the gender of someone can make one "count" as a homosexual. It's a pretty silly question. Being a homosexual is not like some sort of game where one gets tagged and one is "it". Think about it for yourself—if you found out that someone you thought was a boy was a girl, would it make you a homosexual if you liked them as a boy? Or would it just make you someone who was fooled? --24.147.86.187 (talk) 12:41, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Japan
The featured article today says that the Japanese palace was destroyed in 1227, where did the Emperors live after that, and up until the present day, where do they live today? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.191.136.3 (talk) 16:37, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Perkins, George W. (1998) The Clear Mirror: A Chronicle of the Japanese Court during the Kamakura Period (1185-1333) states that tow of the sato dairi (town palaces) were the Kan-in Palace (near the intersection of Nijō and Nishi-no-tōin avenues) in the late Heian and Kamakura periods and Tominokōji Palace (north of Nijō and west of Tominokōji avenues) in the late Kamkura period. The Kan-in Palace burned in 1259, Tominokōji in 1312—was rebuilt—then burned again in 1336.—eric17:36, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
bluray or hddvd?
What is the real difference between bluray and hd DVD? Which is better? I want to decide which one to get, but i really don't know anything about them. If i get a bluray player, will i be able to play hd dvds on it?--Dlo2012 (talk) 16:45, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You're asking the wrong question. At this point in time, the only question should be: "Which one will win the format war?". It doesn't matter how much better one standard is than the other - it only matters whether you'll find yourself in a few years time with a player for which no more movies are available - and a pile of movies that cost you maybe $1000 (30 disks at $30 each maybe) to buy that you won't be able to play when your aging player finally dies because nobody makes the darned things anymore.
The issue of which is the better quality is largely irrelevent in that matter. In the VHS versus Beta versus V2000 videotape wars, the format that died first was V2000 (which was easily the best technologically) - then Beta fell by the wayside (it was the second best format technically-speaking) - and the final winner was the nastiest format with the biggest tape box and the worst playback quality! So quality is no measure of likely longevity - and longevity is what matters if you are planning on buying any significant number of disks for it.
Both sides are working hard to succeed still - a brief glance in Fry's last night suggested that there were more HD-DVD titles out there than BluRay - but that was a very informal "How much shelf space is allocated" kind of a survey!
Right now, I'm not aware of any players that can play both formats. Since both have to be licensed and each needs a different kind of laser, I could easily imagine that a player that could play both formats would be more expensive than two separate players. But your concern shouldn't be the cost or nature of the player. You will spend FAR more on disks than you will on the player. Most movies for these formats are coming in at $30 or more. If you own just 10 disks then the cost of the disks you own will exceed the cost of the player. You shouldn't be asking "Will my player play whatever standard wins?" - you should be asking "When I have $1000 worth of disks in 5 years time - will I still be able to buy a player to view them when mine goes wrong and needs to be replaced?". You shouldn't care as much about the player as the media.
There is alleged to be at least one multi-format player out there (a Pioneer, I think), but for the reasons you stated, I'm staying on the sidelines until the dust settles, else "Guess I'll have to buy the White Album again."
Let me put this simply. Or as it will inevitably turn out if I write it, unbearably long. I'll try to stay brief. IF you want to know which one is better, on a sheer technical scale? Undeniably Blu-ray. It has far more data storage (50 GB) than HD DVD, which has 30 GB on the same number of a layers. HD DVD can support three layers, but no production plans have been made. A Blu-ray disc with 150 GB on two layers is in development, if memory serves. In terms of sheer capacity, Blu-ray has more promise. In terms of production cost, I believe HD DVD is better. I may be wrong on that though. I do know that Blu-ray is slightly less compatible in a few ways, refusing some standards offered to them. Should they have taken them, they would have actually and officially won the format war. In short, Blu-ray is probably the better format, but it has some weaknesses that should be considered. In sales, they are winning, but not overwhelmingly. And HD DVD seems to have support from some of the bigger industry leaders. And lastly, both dual format players and discs exist. If you're really worried, buy a good Blu-ray drive for your computer, and rip them full quality, then burn them to whatever wins. That oughta do it. DRM is no challenge when there's legions of hacker just waiting to take a crack at it. RockMaster-talk|contribs03:47, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Or wait a year. The eventual loser can survive one Christmas - but I doubt they'll make it through a second. The stores aren't going to stand for having to have three sets of shelves with the same things on them (DVD, HD-DVD and BluRay) for very long - and as soon as a few major stores get pissed off and choose one over the other, it's "game over". SteveBaker (talk) 06:02, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Industry leaders don't matter, quality of playback doesn't matter, expense doesn't matter, and the size of the disk doesn't matter. The format war will be won, as other format wars have been, based on which technology the porn industry decides to go with. Matt Deres (talk) 21:47, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
cleverness VS intelligence ... (are they processed in different areas of the brain?)
Why is it that some highly intelligent individuals (say academic
high flyers) lack or have very little levels of cleverness (say that they
could be ripped off easily)?. Take the opposite case -
why some people with very low intelligence (say with very bad academic performence) go on to become successful businessman?.
what exactly is cleverness?!.
yes, there are some cases where both traits coexist and since intelligence is a very fuzzy concept, I am taking academic
performence as a scale to make things simple. Another presupposition
of taking business success as a scale of cleverness reduces the complexity of the problem. If my rather naive approach is right,
please try to answer those three questions... —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.201.72.230 (talk) 17:16, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To me, as someone who has had professional training to be a teacher, what I think you are talking about is called "Multiliteracies" in the jargon of educators. This is a very hot idea right now in the teaching profession, and if you Google that word you'll find lots and lots of stuff about it. What it basically says is that different people have natural inclinations to acquire and process knowledge in different ways. What works for one person might not work for another. It also is an attempt at making different types of knowledge (or literacies) more equal. So, for instance, someone who knows how to hear what's wrong with an automobile engine has one kind of literacy, and someone who can discuss from memory how the Holy Roman Empire was founded has another kind of literacy. Another example would be that someone who can learn best when reading a textbook has a different kind of literacy than someone who learns best by hearing a lecture. The idea is not to put someone down because they can't learn the same way as other people, but to try to approach that person through the way that he or she learns best. I'm not sure whether this has anything to do with physiological brain structure or not. Perhaps if you go surfing through Google about it you'll find something... -- Saukkomies20:40, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Serving food on silver platters
Can food safely be served directly on silver platters or should a doily be used?
doilies should never never ever be used unless you are female and over 90. and then still it is taboo.
If you haven't used nasty stuff to clean the plates, then yes, it is safe. After all, people eat quite happily with silver forks and spoons (if they have them). Silver is a disinfectant, apparently. SaundersW (talk) 19:14, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What is it with doilies? Problem: "We need a barrier to prevent food from dirtying up the plate." Solution: "OK! Let's use a piece of absorbent paper that's punched so full of holes that it's nearly all hole - that'll protect the plate pretty good". My wife (who is French and therefore genetically programmed at conception with all possible knowledge about food) claims that certain foods pick up a metallic taste from silver plates...sadly (as a Brit who lacks all genes relating to food knowledge) I can't recall what foods those are...I kinda suspect shellfish...but I'm not sure. SteveBaker (talk) 03:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
To Steve: your wife is perfectly right. Special spoons in (for example) horn or mother-of-pearl are available for the serving and consumption of caviare. SaundersW (talk) 08:40, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Sadly, I'm out of town right now - I'll try to get the full list from my wife when I call her tonight. However, as User:RockMaster points out, Silver is rather biologically inert, so it's hard to understand WHY it might do weird things to flavor...also quite a few of us have silver amalgam tooth fillings - are we missing out on the flavor of caviare? SteveBaker (talk) 12:45, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
In all actuality, silver is quite inert as a metal in the human body. It does serve some disinfectant properties, but only when properly prepared as an ion. And if by some stretch of the imagination any significant amount got into the digestive tract, it would most likely pass through undigested. It's not called one of the noble metals for nothing. In addition to this, doilies were actually developed for English gentlemen, who's oiled hair (the latest style after powdered wigs) tended to destroy furniture. Rather than junk it, many people decided to protect it with disposable doilies. They were like the slipcovers of today. So a doily is quite the *ahem* manly thing to do. RockMaster-talk|contribs03:20, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well, according to How the Experts Eat: When indulging in caviar, the right utensil is essential, says Armen Petrossian, owner of Petrossian, a U.S. importer of caviar. Silver causes a chemical reaction with the egg, he says, so “gold or mother-of-pearl is best.” Horn and stainless steel also work.SteveBaker (talk) 12:56, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What a terrible shame they don't sell macassar oil anymore. Seriously. It had the best smell in the world, bar none. It was worth putting on your hair for the smell alone. -- JackofOz (talk) 13:50, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Eeeexcellent. Smithers, have 20 tons of the stuff brought to my office immediately. -- Monty Burns of Oz
If an antimacassar collided with macassar would it release a photon? And how is silver a "noble metal whjebn it reacts with so many chemicals? Sounds like a downright slutty metal. Edison (talk) 16:17, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I was told in long-ago chemistry lessons that the noble metals were metals that were found native in nature in nugget form and did not need chemical extraction. Chemistry and terminology may have changed since then. SaundersW (talk) 17:13, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Wow, it's been over a month since someone from your IP range asked about Matrixism. Is this as new record? Seriously though, the article/section says it was "Conceived by an anonymous group in mid-2004". As for the 'where' part of your question, I'm pretty sure it's wholly an internet phenomena. (if 500 people can be called a phenomena.) 72.10.110.107 (talk) 20:28, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
You think there's something phenomenal about nothing? Oh, that I had such powers of perception; to be able to perceive nothing, and at such a distance too.
The pluralisations of certain foreign nouns adopted by English have proven to be conundra, and their misuse often drive linguists to tantra. :) -- JackofOz (talk) 01:03, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
While watching an episode of the New Zealand show 'Sensing Murder' last night I must confess my initial scepticism was somewhat shaken by the rather impressive details that the two psychics claimed to have received from the victim. One went so far as to name who she thought was the murderer while both said that his accomplice had lived in the area and later committed suicide. The accomplice's sister later claimed that this was so.
My question is has there ever been a case anywhere where a criminal has been identified and later convicted based upon information supplied by a psychic? I note that our article on Psychic detectives does not contain any examples of such a success, but thought I might try here. So reference deskers can I return to my happy scepticism or is there indeed something tangible behind the psychic's claims? Lisiate (talk) 21:27, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There was this one woman that did help in police investigations, but i don't remember her name. She appeared on Oprah. No i don't watch oprah, but i just stumbled upon that once.--Dlo2012 (talk) 23:27, 18 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Although the sentence in our article: "Said law enforcements have since denied any such cooperation happened" would tend to put a damper on the proceedings. --Tagishsimon(talk)01:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
At the risk of getting a reputation for being some kind of nutcase, I'll mention that I have actually met someone whom the police used in finding a missing girl's body. It took place in Idaho - but more than that I'll not disclose because this woman does not want to have people know about her. I know, this sound very fishy, and I wouldn't believe me either. But I knew her - she worked at a local hardware store in the paint section (she'd mix peoples' paints for them). I got to know her, but knew nothing of her work helping the police. When an 8-year-old girl in the area came up missing, a huge search was conducted for her, to no avail. After a week had gone by I happened to be in the store having this woman mix some paint for my boss (who was renovating his store at the time), when the police came in and approached her and asked if she could come with them. Later that night they found the girl's body - she had fallen into an irrigation ditch, drowned, and had been swept miles away to get stuck in a culvert that went under a back-country dirt farm road. The girls' parents, though heartstricken with grief over the loss of their daughter, still were somewhat relieved to have closure on this, knowing that she had indeed drowned and was not out there somewhere brought them a degree of peace. The next time I was in the store, the woman took me aside and explained what had happened. She wanted to explain because she didn't want me to get the wrong impression about her being taken away by the police. She said that she helped them out on rare occasions, but refused to take any form of recompense for her work. Further, she never used her "gifts" as she called them for anything other than to help people in need, and only when they asked. She was adamant that her identity never be revealed publicly, and insisted that when she helped the police that they would not tell anyone they had used her. At any rate, according to what she told me, the police took her to the station, where they had some of the girls' toys (they knew before hand what to do). She put her hand on a toy, and then immediately asked for a county road map, and when she got it pointed out precisely where the girl's body was to be found in the culvert pipe under the road. Within the hour they'd recovered her body. So, I do not say that her story is true or not - but I will state that this actually was a conversation I had with this woman, who will remain anonymous. I don't think it's anything anyone can really use on Wiki, since it's completely non-verifiable. So just chalk it down to someone's account of an unverifiable phenomenon. -- Saukkomies01:55, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's PRECISELY the trouble with this stuff though - nobody ever "is" the person who does this work - nobody ever "is" the cop who relied on this person. It's always someone who heard a story from someone who claimed (with minimal evidence) to know someone who claims (without proof) to have done this. They'll tell you all sorts of stories about how the police won't admit that they do this. It's always a 3rd or 4th hand story.
In your case - because we like you - let's play nice and believe every word you just said about what you ACTUALLY know to be true.
The actual facts that you know are:
That a woman gets taken away by the police.
Somewhere else, the consequences of an accident is solved (by the bloody obvious technique of looking downstream of where she was last seen in all likelyhood).
Subsequently, she claims that she was taken away for psychic consultations - and wants all of the details hushed up.
That's all that YOU really know...everything else is 'hearsay'.
Given these cold, hard facts - ask yourself honestly: Which is more likely? (a) that psychic phenomena are real (despite ALL evidence to the contrary) and that (b) police routinely believe in and consult psychics and that (c) she can't tell people about it (although she blabbed to you - a complete stranger!) and that (d) her activities never get reported by the press....or is it more likely that (e) the woman was a suspect in a petty crime or that her car had been towed or any one of a million mundane reasons and had to talk to the police...and that to save her personal embarrassment, she comes up with a cover story about being a psychic and that everyone has to keep this a secret? I'll grant that (e) is a little unlikely - but it's definitely possible - and that's vastly more likely than a conjunction of (a) and (b) and (c) and (d) - which requires a complete overhaul of pretty much all of modern science, plus some unlikely police practices and some suspicious secrecy.
No - as a society we absolutely have to put aside all of this dubious crap until/unless something clearly, provably, demonstrably happens to change that. If we continue to believe all of the lies and deceptions from people like this woman, we'll forever be in the dark ages. If something clearly demonstrable EVER happens, science will immediately rush off and dig up and study all of these cases - but in the meantime, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in this case, we don't even have mundane evidence. We have the word of someone whom the police took away unexpectedly and who could easily have a motive to lie.
If she truly can do this - why doesn't she go and claim her milion dollars? If her story is true, how could she POSSIBLY deny that opportunity? Maybe she doesn't need the money - but why not do it for charity - or for the betterment of mankind? The reason is because it's complete and utter hogwash and she knows damned well she can't do it for real! If you see her again...ask her this and wait for the hard-to-believe, evasive replies.
Some people wouldn't go on Survivor or Millionaire for a million dollars - what kind of argument is that? No wonder people keep their privacy in the face of so much bias and outrage. Julia Rossi (talk) 03:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
That's a pretty specious comparison. Sure, some people wouldn't do go on Survivor or Millionaire - but an awful lot do - those shows are never short of contestants and lots of people walk off with the big money prizes. Why doesn't one single "genuine" psychic come forward and agree to be tested under controlled conditions? Not ONE? Don't you find that just the tiniest bit surprising? How come James Randi can't find a single contestant for his million dollar game show? If this stuff works, then how come not one single "genuine" psychic will come forward to prove conclusively that this stuff is real, claim the megabuck and erase this so-called-"bias" once and for all? It's not even that Randi's is the only prize - we have an entire pageful of unclaimed big money psychic/paranormal prizes: See List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal. Come on - think about this! It's just not credible. SteveBaker (talk) 05:15, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hi SteveBaker, firstly "Do not start debates or post diatribes. The reference desk is not a soapbox." Okay? Secondly lots of people in many fields don't feel the need to prove themselves in the public arena. Maybe you can take this discussion somewhere more suitable. Not my page by the way. Julia Rossi (talk) 05:24, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
So when you contest my answer - that's OK - but when I contest your reply it's a diatribe. Sounds like you've run out of good debating points. Cool! SteveBaker (talk) 05:33, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
SteveBaker's answer was perfectly reasonable. He pointed out that a previous answer(Saukkomies's) was very logically suspect and a bit naive, then he explained why.
Perhaps SteveBaker would get less complaints if he gave more fun answers like "Sure! Neutrino-based cellphones are a brilliant idea! But you'd only really need it if a negative aura is interfering with your latent psychic ability." 72.10.110.107 (talk) 14:44, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
A lot of psychics make a lot of predictions, nearly all of them inaccurate. However, occasionally, just by chance, a few match actual events closely enough to be claimed as successes. Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. See Infinite monkey theorem. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:10, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
When it comes to relying on the word of others for phenomena that cannot be reproduced under controlled circumstances, I have to agree with Steve 100%. What is more likely: that something which all systematic study tells us is impossible has occurred, or that someone is lying/is mistaken/is fooled/is just wrong? In my experience, humans are excessively fallible, even assuming the best of faith, and I of course include myself in this (if I were reporting psychic/ghost/magic/extraterrestrial/whatever phenomena I'd be just as critical and dubious of my own perceptions of it as I would be of others'). As has been long said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and it is often those making the most extraordinary claims who say that they can't give any hard evidence. It all stinks a bit too much of charlatanism, at worst, to be a coincidence. Charlatans I have seen; psychics, I have not. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 13:24, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The thought that always springs to mind for me is that if were a policeman on a case and a psychic offered to help and reveals details about the scene that are accurate and even provides details that hadn't been mentioned to the general public,that person would immediately go to the top of my suspect list. Lemon martini (talk) 14:48, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
On the other side of the equation, various psychics have been called in by the police to see if they can help with solving cases, eg. Peter Hurkos on the Boston Strangler case, and Gerard Croiset on the Beaumont children case and others. They may have had no success, and they may have generally been considered charlatans, but if the police thought that it was absolutely impossible they could be of any assistance, why would they have been brought on board in the first place? The police must have thought they had some chance, however slim, of solving the cases. -- JackofOz (talk) 22:13, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, this says nothing at all about whether any "psychic" actually has any extraordinary gift that might help them solve a crime. It merely proves that there exist some police who are gullible enough to think that a psychic might help them. That's not really all that surprising. Police are authority figures in that they are experts at how to enforce the law, but they have no expertise at evaluating whether some supposed paranormal phenomenon might have some basis in reality. MrRedact (talk) 22:35, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Dare I suggest that policemen are not the paragons of science or reason? (I've got nothing too personal against cops, but none of the ones I've met have been exactly what I'd call intellectuals, or what they'd probably call intellectuals either.) Personally I would see appealing to prayer/psychics/magic as a rather sad form of desperation. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 22:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for all the contributions - so far as I can see there's no clear example of psychic's being successful at all. I can remain sceptical I guess. Lisiate (talk) 01:32, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Despite millions of police cases and thousands of Psychic over the years there is not ONE credible well documented case of a Psychic solving a crime. You would be much better off reading books than watching TV shows, which are always biased to make them entertaining (its boring if everything proved to be non-Psychic). What you have to remember about Psychic is they play 'word' games. This is generally how they get credibility it goes like this: Claim to have a vision etc. about a murder. Police are interested and contact them. Psychic now goes around saying they have 'assisted' police in investigations (Silvia Brown for example claims to have assisted police is over three hundreds of investigations). If or not their information was useful or even used in the case is never known. If the Psychic turns out to know nothign about the case, the whole 'assistance' thing isn't even reported or documented with the case - because it had nothing to do with the case. Thus you can get all the documents for police cases were 'Psychic's assisted, not find a SINGLE mention of any interview with any of them.--Dacium (talk) 01:59, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Hey, hold on here everybody. I actually agree with SteveBaker! That is why in the story I clearly stated that it was "someone's account of an unverifiable phenomenon". Did anyone see anywhere in that story that I was saying: "This is real"??? No, and I am a tiny bit offended by some of the responses from people who seem to be saying that my story is not based in logic or full of beans. Of course it is. But that doesn't mean I cannot repeat what I experienced and leave it to the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. I regard myself as a man of science, and as such I do NOT reject anything out of hand without proof one way or the other that it is either false or true. Some people have difficulty being comfortable about NOT KNOWING about some things or not being able to accept that it might be possible for certain phenomena in the natural world do not coincide with their philosophy. How I feel about this story I told about what this woman told to me is simply: I do not know. And I am not uncomfortable with that. I do not have to fit it into any logical construct, either, but to just let it stand as it is - a piece of data to reflect on and perhaps use later if other data come in that will add some understanding to it, whether to prove or disprove what it is. THAT is the real Scientific Method. -- Saukkomies21:30, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
December 19
Creation of New Article Approval
Would it be in best interest of the community for me (Evershiner) to write an article on the existence and non-existence of the time spectrum? Thank you all for your time and good luck to the future of Wikipedia.
Be Bold :) If it isn't exactly verifiable, it doesn't mean it's not interesting. If it gets the chop, post your original version somewhere else. It certainly sounds interesting. Steewi (talk) 02:21, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The usual rules are that the subject of an article should be:
Verifiable - that is to say, you must be able to list some books, scientific papers, or web pages produced by reputable people to show that what you say is true.
It must not be about newly-coined words or terms (i.e. neologisms).
Note especially that you can't write about ideas you've come up with by yourself - you MUST be able to point to reputable external resources to back up everything you say in the article. A quick google search for "Time Spectrum" doesn't turn up any web pages that look relevent - so I suspect this subject is going to fail the notability test - and possibly the verifiable and no-original-research rules too.
Arne Jacobsen designed the Vola series in close collaboration with Teit Weylandt in 1969. Did someone from maybe the Bauhaus or elsewhere design a self-consciously "Modern" faucet (stylistically speaking)prior to that? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.127.191.146 (talk) 01:32, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
What are you defining as a modern faucet? The ones in my house, for example, look not too different from ones that might have been there 100 years ago, from a strictly design point of view. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 00:08, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Well Richard Manoogian allegedly perfected the single-lever hot and cold faucet in the 1950s ... our article doesn't record whether he thought he was being self-consciously "Modern" or merely creative. As 24.147.86.187 noted, we need a better definition of "modern" as applied to faucets ... I'm going to presume that definition is "primarily the simplification of form and the elimination of ornament" and suspect that it is most unlikely, but not out of the question, that Vola could be considered the first "modern" faucet. You know, there isn't enough faucet history on the web :( -Tagishsimon(talk)00:20, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Toronto's pacific mall.
This question is for people that know toronto!! You know pacific mall, the chinese mall with all the pirated movies that are like 5 dollars eash? I wanted to get the first season of robot chicken and the new futurama movie on dvd. BUT I couldnt find it any of the stores. Is their a store that sells "robot chicken" or "futurama". If so where is the store? (Superawesomgoat (talk) 01:56, 19 December 2007 (UTC))[reply]
Dear Wikipedia: I'm planning to do something illegal - could you help me to plan it? Nevermind that your and my words will be recorded on a public web server for posterity with no means to ever erase them. Yeah...right...smart. SteveBaker (talk) 02:13, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
And I am going to do it in a shopping mall that gets raided about twice a year for selling pirated DVDs, and where the police maintain cameras of who is selling what, and to whom, on a regular basis. The last raid was late August, of this year, I think. Bielle (talk) 04:14, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'm starting to believe that the original poster's time here at Wikipedia is limited, seeing as how the only edits they've made were to post wind-up questions on the various reference desks.
Sorry for the horrible title but anyway. When i see like planed homes in the suburbs they always have like a huge ditch thing next to them fenced off. What are these things for.
If the big hole is not for the foundation of the house then it may be for conduits of various sorts: telephone, electricity, gas, sewer, water, all of which tend to be placed underground, in my part of North America, at any rate. The fencing will be to keep people and animals from falling in and to keep thieves out once there is something in the hole. Bielle (talk) 03:53, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If you are talking about a whole development of a bunch of new homes it could be a swale purposefully made for several possible reasons. In many places new development is required to mitigate any wetlands filled by creating new places for water to drain into and serve somewhat the same purpose as the former wetland. It could also be the result of digging up soil from one place in order to level out and raise the surface of the land for the houses, especially in areas prone to flooding. Relatedly, it could have something to do with drainage -- a new housing development typically alters the natural drainage pattern. Drainage ditches are one result. Such swales might be fenced off because they are subject to flooding, or because new housing developments seem to love fences. I'm not exactly sure if I'm thinking of the same kind of thing you are describing, so this could all be missing the point. Pfly (talk) 09:06, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I live near Washington, DC. In my area, a new development usually replaces either grassland or woodland. The problem is that the development paves over and/or disrupts a pre-existing viable ecosystem that is capable of absorbing almost all of the rainfall and then releasing it slowly. The new development cannot absorb the rainfall, so it runs off into the Potomic river, taking excess fertilizer and dirt with it. Therefore, developers are required to create catchment basins. These are dry "ponds" with embankments that are engineered to be able to hold all of the runoff from a major storm. These catchments will fill to about a foot deep several times a year, and will fill much deeper once every few years. In an extreme "once a century" storm, a catchment will overflow, and it is designed to overflow without failing. The catchment is fenced to prevent children from drowning on the rare occasions when water is present. After a development has aged for a few years, the lawns and trees begin to take on the job of sequestering some of the runoff, and the catchment becomes less important. However, I know of no system for acknowledging this and "decomissioning" a catchment, and after all, the "hundred-year storm" becomes ore likely with global warming. -Arch dude (talk) 01:31, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Digital Switch-Off Date
Why does the Australian government want to switch-off analogue television by 2012? I have a digital set top box and definitely agree that digital television is the much better than analogue television (better picture, EPG, aspect ratio, extra channels), but does it really matter if both forms of television co-exist? Why does it matter if channels want to broadcast in both digital and in analogue? The original channels (ABC, SBS, Seven, Nine, Ten in most metro areas) are simulcast on digital and analogue anyway - why should it stop? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.208.109.169 (talk) 05:11, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
In short...MONEY! If the situation in Australia is anything like here in the USA, the radio/TV part of the electromagnetic spectrum (from 50MHz to around 1000MHz) is pretty full - and the rapidly growing cellular telephone and WiFi Internet sector is pushing the limits of what's available. By moving television from analog to digital, the signal can be compressed so it fits into a smaller 'slot' in the radio spectrum. Then, after a reasonable change-over period the section of the spectrum containing the old analog TV signal can be sold off (probably to cellular providers). Here in the USA, the rights to broadcast in just one section of the 700MHz region of the radio spectrum is about to sell by auction for at least 4.6 billion dollars. That's plenty of reason not to keep the old analog TV system running for very long once the change-over happens! SteveBaker (talk) 05:49, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Additionally, there is the "if not now, when?" argument. It costs money to broadcast a signal in both digital and analog. So why put the money into it for another five or ten years for the holdout viewers who still haven't upgraded their sets/boxes to digital? The technology is here, it's stable and working, so why wait unnecessarily? Switching now just gets it done with and the then unused spectrum can be used for other things as SteveBaker points out. Dismas|(talk)08:09, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, so it's mainly so there is more room in the broadcasting spectrum. I knew it cost money to broadcast in both, but why is the government concerned? If the commercial channels wish to broadcast in both, why should they be stopped? The two government channels - ABC and SBS - would affect the government (and tax payer) to broadcast in both, but otherwise, why should the government stop the commercial channels? 203.208.109.169 (talk) 11:13, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The government is probably only concerned because they have been lobbied by the industry to change the standards, and because governments are often/usually in charge of things like broadcast regulations and allotting bandwidth (to avoid incompatibilities/interference). --24.147.86.187 (talk) 12:37, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Spectrum is an issue but digital actually uses wider spectrum then analog to broadcast more content. So there is an issue with spectrum but not the one presented here. FCC actually decided on going to digital way before the public even heard of DTV much less seen a HDTV on the shelves. If you look at it from the broadcaster's prespective, why waste money broadcasting both standard when one will do. Looking at consumers, why swich when there's no content available in the new format. It's a catch-22. FCC had to step in to mandate a date for the switch to get everyone moving forward. Broadcasters have actually pushed this date back because they couldn't meet the requirement on time. NYCDA (talk) 20:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any other reasons why you would have a very low lymphocytes count in your body, Besides just HIV? If you are considered to be a fairly healthy person.71.205.179.63 (talk) 22:03, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I live in the north east of Scotland, and just now there is an incredibly bright light in the sky, not a star but like a constant almost gold coloured light that barely moves from morning until night, although its obviously only visible at night. Is this a satelite monitoring something, or something else? Thanks. JG. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.178.239.127 (talk) 22:45, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I can make out, you should be able to see Saturn - low in the sky - and Mars, somewhat higher. One of these might be the culprit. See if you can figure out this site, for instance. Aberdeen is 57.15N 2.11W. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tagishsimon (talk • contribs) 23:03, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
There is no way for a star or a planet to not move across the sky as the earth rotates. If we have the whole story here - then this has to be something 'geostationary' - but anything that's in a stable geostationary orbit would have to be a long way away (not like low-earth-orbit stuff like the ISS that are close enough to be naked-eye objects) - and that would make it too dim to see. I don't see how this can happen - can we get some more information please? Where is it relative to the horizon? High or low? Is it to your north, south, east or west? Are you in hilly or flat terrain? SteveBaker (talk) 00:00, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I know competition is supposed to make prices lower, and it does in most cases, but has anyone noticed that it also drives up prices?
Many years ago, GAP jeans were good quality and were $30-40. Then diesel jeans came out for like $80. Then Seven's came out, drove the price to $120+. Then diesel jeans raises the prices on the next batch (or next seasons jeans), and now I see jeans for over $250 (I'm not talking high end stuff like Armani or D&G). Its kinda crazy, and GAP jeans prices have gone way up too. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.167.138.192 (talk) 23:37, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I wouldn't say it was competition doing that - it's "What the market will stand". You can still get <$20 jeans in WalMart - you simply have a clientel who don't want to spend less because there are social benefits to telling people how much you paid. SteveBaker (talk) 23:52, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
what is the longest recorded held mobile phone number used to date, my freind has has his since mobiles first came out over 15 years ago and still uses the same number is this a record? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.97.161.115 (talk) 00:49, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
"Songs"
Hello, I was asking how can you write a treble clef and bass clef and alto into a grand staff and write the time and key signature with it? I'm trying to write sheet music for a song I'm writing and I was wondering how you could wirte like Mozart, five-hundred years before the advent of computers? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.250.175.113 (talk) 01:26, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Not sure I understand your question. Look at any orchestral score - it will have different lines for different instruments. Some use the treble clef, some the bass, some the alto. Harps use both treble and bass, as do pianos if there are any in the orchestration. All the instruments have the same time signature, and the same key signature (except for transposing instruments). It's not the case that all the treble-clef instruments are at the top, all the bass-clef instruments are at the bottom, and the other-clef instruments are in between - they're more or less all over the place. It's a lot more orderly when it comes to songs with a guitar or piano accompaniment. -- JackofOz (talk) 01:37, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Are you talking about being able to compose music like Mozart did - which was that he would write all the different parts for each instrument as he went along through the piece? In other words, Mozart would write the notes for a particular measure for the violins, then for the same measure for the violas, then for that same measure again for the cellos, and then again for the bass, and so forth on down the page covering all the instruments. Then he'd start again at the top with the next measure in the piece - writing from top to bottom for each measure. Everyone else in the world writes music so that they would write one instrument at at time. So they'd write the whole piece for the violin, then go back and write the whole piece for the viola, etc. We know Mozart did this because we have some of the manuscripts he used to compose his original works, and we can see by the way the pen was dragged slightly down the page that he was composing in this way - the only person known to be able to do this kind of thing for a full orchestral symphony. WHat is more, he would not go back and edit his music very much - he got it right the first time through. This means that he had inside his head the entire symphony for all the pieces in the orchestra at the same time, and was transcribing onto paper the whole thing all at once. A true genius. -- Saukkomies21:46, 19 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Formal academic format
In formal academic writing, should the paragraphs be aligned left or justified? As well, how many spaces of indent should there be between subsequent paragraphs and should there be a line space between each paragraph? Thanks. Acceptable (talk) 02:13, 20 December 2007 (UTC)[reply]
