Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 May 9

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May 9[edit]

Screaming at concerts[edit]

I was listening to The Kinks on one of their early live albums (probably Live at Kelvin Hall), and noticed the incessant screaming that was a hallmark of the era. It made me wonder, and not for the first time, about the history of this odd behavior: in particular, when and why did it stop? Did it stop being tolerated by the performers (I know the Beatles hated it, and I'm sure others did too), or was it a fad that just faded away? Have any rock scholars covered this topic? --jpgordon::==( o ) 14:46, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Do they scream at Justin Bieber concerts? (Or did they before he started accumulating some bad press?) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:02, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It never stopped. Some bands attract screamers and some don't. Remember that the Kinks were a pop act that attracted young people (who tend to do the most screaming, especially the girls). They are old now. New bands attract the screaming, like One Direction and acts like that. Mingmingla (talk) 15:52, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
My wife took our 14 year-old daughter to a One Direction concert last year. The audience screaming was so bad that my wife's ears hurt for a few hours afterwards. Girls still scream at concerts.59.167.253.199 (talk) 05:31, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
  • This article from 1993] does a pretty good job of giving the overview of scholarship on girls screaming at concerts. It cites the works of sociologists and psychologists who have looked at the phenomenon. --Jayron32 17:58, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
    More: I've seen a few blogs and discussion forums (like here) that note that Erich Fromm discussed this very phenomenon in his work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. --Jayron32 18:02, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Here's another interesting article that traces music concert "mania" back to... Franz Liszt and the Lisztomania of the 1840s.[1] (The young Liszt actually did have a pretty amazing head of hair along with his musical talent...) Charles Lindbergh and Rudolph Valentino had hordes of screaming fans too. OttawaAC (talk) 21:01, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It still happens on TV singing competitions. As soon as the audience recognise the song, they start screaming (as if to drown it out), then they tend to grow quiet (as if to actually listen to the the performance), until the "climax note", when they all scream again (as if to drown it out once more. Crazy. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 22:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Given the manufactured nature of such shows, and the fact that live TV shows often have audience warm-up phases where the producers get the audience into the state desired for the broadcast part of the show, the screaming is presumably a desired behaviour. It doesn't impress me, but then I'm not normal. I wonder who it does impress? HiLo48 (talk) 22:44, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Vince McMahon. His top dog this last decade has been raking in the cash, primarily on his ability to make low-voiced people want to outscream high-pitched ones. It's acoustically impossible, but the resulting cacophony is good for business (and what is pro wrestling, but the concert business with less music?) InedibleHulk (talk) 23:24, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Resting place of Kings of Naples[edit]

Where are all the kings of Naples descended from Ferdinand I of Naples and their consorts buried?--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 15:00, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to the Italian wikipedia they are all buried in the sacristy of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples: "According to tradition, the whole Aragonese dynasty (1442-1503) was buried there and among the bodies was also present that of King Alfonso V of Aragon, called the Magnanimous, who died in 1458, whose remains however were transferred to Spain in 1668 [my translation]." --Cam (talk) 15:24, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I have more details (monarch, burial place):
Ferdinand I, San Domenico Maggiore [2]
Alfonso II, Messina Cathedral [3]
Ferdinand II, San Domenico Maggiore [4]
Frederick, "chiesa dei minimi di Plessis-les-Tours" (Couvent des Minimes de la Place Royale?); in 1562 his tomb was broken into and the bones scattered. [5]
--Cam (talk) 15:42, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Scattered in the tomb, or outside? InedibleHulk (talk) 05:47, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The source says le ossa di F. vengono disperse "Frederick's bones are dispersed" (historical present). His tomb was one of those destroyed during the French Wars of Religion (others include that of Saint Irenaeus and Saint Francis of Paola).--Cam (talk) 18:44, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why is the Vice President not Acting President while the President is out of the country?[edit]

Why does the American Vice President not become Acting President while the President is out of the country? I ask, because most Lt. Governors become Acting Governor while the Governor's absence from the state. Wouldn't it be more logical the other way around, as federal business is more "important" than the states'? --78.50.240.5 (talk) 20:12, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think it has to do with the Constitution. It states that the Vice President's role is head of the Senate, and only becomes Acting President when the current one is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office", according to the 25th Amendment, which I don't think applies when the President is, say, traveling to Serbia or wherever. And plus, the rules vary from state to state because of different constitutions and junk. today too, i don't necessarily think that it's more logical that way in the federal government, because the president and vice president are more and more frequently out of the country and what happens then/? ~Helicopter Llama~ 20:31, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Not only the constitution, which is the correct answer, but also the fact that presidents attend foreign funerals and conferences as heads of state, while governors don't, and the most recent amendment, the 25th, addressing this after Kennedy's assassination, was written in the instant telecommunication age. μηδείς (talk) 20:48, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Governors attend out-of-state functions too. Every constitution is different, and part of it probably is date, but part is probably the importance of the president: Changing presidents is a big deal (the acting president could start a war), while it generally doesn't matter too much if a LG officially takes over once in a while. Most people won't even be aware that the LG has taken over, but imaging the uproar if Cheney had been acting president. — kwami (talk) 20:52, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Bad example. "If"? --jpgordon::==( o ) 22:23, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I see what you did there...--Jayron32 02:12, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note that until the 20th century it used to be that US presidents never did leave the country. The first to do so was Theodore Roosevelt, who visited Panama in 1906. Then at the end of WW1 Woodrow Wilson spent months in Europe, primarily at the peace talks leading to the Treaty of Versailles. If Roosevelt felt he could leave the country and still be president, and Wilson felt he could do it for a period of months, then the precedent was set and it would take a constitutional amendment to change it.

P.S. In the CAPTCHA that I had to pass to post the external links here, the first word was teddy. Cute! --50.100.193.30 (talk) 07:20, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Associated Press is wrong here; Wilson was the first president to travel outside the United States. See Canal Zone, a US territory, which is what Roosevelt was visiting. Nyttend (talk) 13:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
How did TR get from DC to Panama without leaving US territorial waters? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:11, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Monroe Doctrine? Market St.⧏ ⧐ Diamond Way 06:01, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why are SATs and ACTs at like 7 am?[edit]

What the hell is wrong with them? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 22:09, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

the brain is more active and efficient in the morning, long tests need plenty of time, and college board simply loves torturing their american teenagers <3 ~Helicopter Llama~ 22:13, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Don't mornings usually involve things like being at least 30 minutes after the minimum physically possible full-sleep time (8:30 for teenagers), to allow for travel? Although it'd be possible with prescription medicine. Or flying 1 or 2 thousand miles to the west (if allowed), or traveling slowly to the east spending enough time to acclimate to the local astronomical and horological conditions followed by a mad dash to the test, similar to mountain climbers. I'm serious. I know I'm not exaggerating because I went east by bus at age 15.4. It took me all of 4 hours to notice the 7% faster time. "Why'd it get dark so soon? Oh, local solar time". I didn't notice 2 straight days of 25 hours on the way there. I feel sorry for people who live in my time zone and 10° to the west. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:17, 10 May 2014 (UTC) (Also, I didn't notice the change to 24 hour days in between (I had 2 1/2 of them) so this is definitely a circadian incompatibility to losing as little as 18 minutes from a 24 hour day. The next 2 days felt short, like slight time traveling — they were 23 hours. I didn't like them.) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Also, my other question got late morning as the time of peak performance. The test proper starts about the time otherwise known as brushing your teeth or sleep. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
The test is administered by people whose biological clocks consider that a decent time to be up and about, instead of taking into consideration that teenagers are naturally more awake a couple hours later. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:16, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It's good preparation for jobs that demand high level performance over very long and inconvenient hours. HiLo48 (talk) 22:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
And who's forcing you to choose to work 7-5? Work 9-5, live within 15 minutes, eat in the train or car, and you get a full sleep up 30 minutes later than the minimum you're capable of (midnight) to. So the reverse affirmative action for a group already favored by life (teens physically capable of sleeping b4 11; teens who's parents would find a doctor or buy a few points with medium-haul air tickets thus showing cash, convinceability and helpfulness that'll help them all life) and hour minimum of sleep deprivation is a purposeless prep for something that doesn't have to happen. An infringement of liberty, too. G-d, if any parents would let their Eastern Time kids test in Denver instead of taking the drugs because they heard the hour of medicated sleep is slightly less restorative than natural sleep then those kids won't ever need their diploma.Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Not if your shift's usually from 3 pm to midnight. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:38, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think any other English-speaking countries would start tests quite as early as that. Some children must be having to get up and five, and probably not have any breakfast. Is there a logistical reason for it? Itsmejudith (talk) 00:57, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
In the US's defense it's actually 8am but no one would arrive that late, and I just could not perform well on the Formula One-like ACT without time to relax first which is why I remember the dreaded 7 (I arrived 7:something). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That's still earlier than any exam I've taken. GCSEs and A-levels generally start at 9am if they're morning exams, with a few exceptions at 11am and things like that. 9am is the time most people expect to start a workday or a schoolday (most schools start roughly half an hour earlier, but in such a way that lessons start at roughly 9): why would you start an exam earlier than that? Does the exam take more than 6 hours to complete? 86.146.28.229 (talk) 10:10, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
It takes some time for the teachers who are administering the test to ensure that everyone has number 2 pencils... then hand out the test material... then read the test instructions out loud, and make sure that everyone understands how to correctly fill in the little ovals ... etc. etc. Only after all these (mandatory) preliminary steps are done, can the actual testing begins... and by then it is a more reasonable hour. Blueboar (talk) 02:58, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That still doesn't solve the problem that it's physiologically impossible for some to fall asleep before ~11, except in cases of prescription medicine or much worse preparatory sleep deprivation that I didn't want to do (I might've needed up to 2 hours of undersleep for up to 3 days to achieve 10pm, I don't remember, I tend to not make up sleep on that side). I remember feeling sleep deprived at least an hour after the preliminaries started. The ACT starts with a 45 minute barrage of almost a hundred questions and the SAT has harder questions, that's what you want to do sleep deprived? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Ever travelled to a different time zone? HiLo48 (talk) 06:16, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
By bus at age 15.4, in mid-February. I went due west of New York for 2 days. I did the reverse after 62 hours. So 2 dusks were an hour late (gaining 2 hours), then 2 were on-time. I didn't feel anything. I learned that could live in 25 hour solar days for the rest of my life. I didn't even think of time after that, until dark came only 0.3 hours early and I suddenly realized it "The day's over already? Oh right, local solar time" It took me only 4 hours to notice and dislike "107% speed time". If the Earth accelerated to 23:42 I might not be able to keep up. The next 2 days felt short, like slight time traveling — they were 23 hours. I didn't like them. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not a teen anymore but I still don't mind a 4am bedtime. If it doesn't pass 4 then sleeping an hour later is as easy as staying still. 2 hours is still easy. I've gone from 12 to 4am in one night a few times. (sometimes that's mediumly hard but 2-3 times it was easy) I still can't sustain evening sleep. Or go backwards (note my reaction to 23:42 days). Non-prescription sleeping pills can only help like 15 minutes and just make me uncomfortable for nothing before that. I wanted a quicker fix so I found out what the side effects of going above the standard dose were and what would warn me that I'm nearing irreversible damage. I just could not sleep more than unless it felt close to surgical anesthesia. That would've worked awesome, I wish I could have something that felt like that did. I took 1 more pill every 11 till I reached 10 pills. I hoped that by 10 (10!) the irresistible force might finally move the immovable object and I'd finish the bedtime relocation in one night. Instead I just got sleepier then I've ever been in my life and it could never be ended by sleep. I'd always fell asleep fast when I was very sleepy before. The anxiety might be psychotropic. I think I even got sleepy and alert at the same time. And the worst flavor of sleepiness, maybe even worse than 2-5 hour sleep-deprived sleepiness. I think I felt a little like falling. It felt like an illegal drug. I didn't get "high" but they don't all make you "high". It was starting to make my lungs uncomfortable. I thought this might be like a weaker version of what a lethal injection feels like, with a different heart drug. My eyes got sore from the closing, and I only did that when it was working. My heart was beating twice as fast and even though the way it was decelerating maybe 100 pills wouldn't fail a heart from exhaustion and that was "the sign" I decided to never take this drug again. (Prolly hell on earth if you were conscious 100 pills, though) It only made it easy to sleep after I woke from sufficient sleep. Fucking pills. It was hard not to nap then. Don't do this, it's very unpleasant and I don't know what effects this has on the liver, though it was brief.
After that, I took 10 melatonin pills and listened to the most sleep-inducing song ever made, according to scientists, thrice. A song which has a non-zero chance of making you involuntarily sleep while driving. I thought this was guaranteed to make me sleep 4 hrs early in one swoop. Didn't work. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I'm certain that there's a gender difference here and that boys' brains have been proved to function best later in the morning than girls', but I can't find a reference at this moment (maybe it's too early!). Alansplodge (talk) 08:28, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
Confirmation! I'm male. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
I got relevant Google search results from these papers: Gender, the Brain and Education: Do Boys and Girls Learn Differently? by Angela Josette Magon, Do Later School Start Times Really Help High School Students? Evidence supports later school starts for high school students. John Cline, Ph.D. and A’s from Zzzz’s? The Causal Effect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents, USAF Academy. I'm afraid you'll have to read them to find out if there's anything pertinent to your query - good luck. Alansplodge (talk) 17:35, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
My high school classes started at 6:45 AM, the bus picked us up at 6 AM, I had to leave home at 5:30 AM to get to the bus stop in time, and it took me a couple hours in the morning to shower, shave, eat breakfast, get dressed, etc., so I had to be up at 3:30 AM, and had to set my alarm to 3 AM to get up then. To get 8 hours sleep, then, I had to be in bed by 7 PM, even when it was light out and people were making lots of noise. It was like a conspiracy to deny me my sleep. I ended up napping for hours every day after school.
I think the reason the high school started so early was that they used the same buses for high school, starting at 6:45, middle school, starting at 7:30, and elementary school, starting at 8:15. Still, you'd think they could have shifted everything at least an hour later. StuRat (talk) 01:49, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
That systematic early childhood abuse explains a lot of things I've often wondered about, Stu. Thanks for sharing. -- Jack of Oz [pleasantries] 22:45, 13 May 2014 (UTC) [reply]

Adriano fiorentino[edit]

What is this File:Adriano fiorentino, medaglia di ferdinando d'aragona principe di capua.JPG? It is not a coin. --The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 23:48, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think 'megdalia' translates as 'medal or 'medallion'. Our article on Medals notes that "In Europe, from the late Middle Ages on, it became common for sovereigns, nobles, and later, intellectuals to commission medals to be given simply as gifts to their political allies to either maintain or gain support of an influential person. The medals made be made in a range of metals, such as gold, silver-gilt, silver, bronze, and lead, depending on the status of the recipient. They were typically up to about three inches across, and usually featured the head of the donor on the obverse, surrounded by an inscription with their name and title, and their emblem on the reverse, with a learned motto inscribed round the edges. Such medals were not usually intended to be worn, although they might have been set as pendants on a chain. From the 16th century onward, medals were made, both by rulers for presentation and private enterprise for sale, to commemorate specific events, including military battles and victories, and from this grew the practice of awarding military medals specifically to combatants, though initially only a few of the much higher-ranking officers." Such medals/medallions seem to have been common in Renaissance Italy. Adriano Fiorentino was the sculptor who created the medal. [6] AndyTheGrump (talk) 02:53, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]