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April 10

imitation of advanced cultures

There seem to be several instances in history where persons or groups have been taught and have learned the ways of a more advanced culture to the degree of being able to imitate that culture and to represent its upholdings. In some cases as good if not better than the descendants of the more advanced culture. In these cases, however, it appears that this is the reason they are given a position to rule so that the new actual descendants of the advanced culture can busy themselves with advancing even further which being mired in and by their past would not otherwise allow them to do. What Wikipedia articles cover this topic to any degree? 71.100.3.207 (talk) 01:15, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Cargo cult may be the most extreme example of the first part of your question. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 01:18, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Having read a little of the article and and scanned the rest what came to mind was the advanced state of health care coverage practiced by other nations and some companies in the US that offered it as incentive versus merely higher pay being the "cargo" behind the great push for universal health care in the USA. I recall hearing that to encourage passage of the health care bill some congregations in the USA, at least prayed for health care passage if not incorporating health care acquisition into rituals (other than those rallies where participants would in unison poke their fists in the air while chanting the words "Healthcare! Healthcare!"). Would this be the same thing? 71.100.3.207 (talk) 01:58, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Err, I don't really see the analogy. The people who want healthcare reform generally understand (to whatever degree) how to go about getting it. The cargo cults do not understand the causal mechanism of cargo drops. Anyway this is a thread derailing and is entirely irrelevant to the original question. Rallies are not the same thing as making fake airports. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:35, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The second part is roughly what happened to the Germanic tribes who encountered the Roman Empire. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:36, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Can you point me to articles apart from those that cover the intoxicated and insane folly of the Nazi attempt to reestablish ancient Roman rule? 71.100.3.207 (talk) 02:03, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Sure...that's not at all what I was thinking of anyway, sorry. I meant stuff like migration period, Ostrogoths, Visigoths... Adam Bishop (talk) 02:29, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

On what basis does one determine one culture more "advanced" than another? Technology and culture are not synonyms. I would recommend, if trying to deal with this question, look into the differences between "kultur" and "civilization" as they were proposed by the French Enlightenment and, later, German thinkers. A good starting point could be Joan deJean's book Ancients Against Moderns.Heather Stein (talk) 16:55, 10 April 2010. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Hfeatherina (talk • contribs)

The technigues such as Kaizen used by Japanese manufacturers were said to be developed from American management practises of the 1950s. Every culture thats been busy and has brought itself to the attention of other cultures has been imitated by them - its more a result of a lot of promotion rather than one being more advanced than the other. Buddism is imitated by a lot of people in Western countries. Examples are British colonial culture and more recently American culture. That deals with the first sentance of your question, I'm not sure I understand or agree with the assumptions of your second sentance, although locals were employed as administators of various kinds in the British empire, and perhaps we gave indepenance to various countries as we didnt want to keep funding the empire and its army. 78.146.60.36 (talk) 08:12, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Scottish Road Sign

What is the meaning of this sign?

[1]

--71.98.64.15 (talk) 01:30, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm just getting an overhead map. Can you describe the sign? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:33, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

For me it showed up as overhead view first and then switched to a close-up of the sign. —Tamfang (talk) 20:13, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Dang, its showing up as a street view for me. If you street view the corner of main street and castle street with the camera panned towards the coast there is a brown sign with an arrow on it and the logo looks like a Celtic design. That is all —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.98.64.15 (talk) 01:39, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Brown signs indicate visitor attractions. That celtic knot isn't a standard road sign feature - it must pertain to the specific attraction. Given Portmahomack is titchy, surely this attraction will appear here - looking at the few option there, I think it's for the Tarbat Discovery Centre. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 01:45, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The interior of the centre features a knot design motif and a similar design appears on stone items displayed there, such as this one. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 01:51, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

And indeed if you streetview near the south end of Tarbatness Road (much further south than Google places the centre) you see its entrance, which again shows that symbol. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 02:09, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I think this is the sign for the Pictish Trail. There's another one here for the Edderton Cross Slab. Finlay McW is right that the Portmahomack sign is for the (excellent) Tarbat Discovery Centre. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 17:51, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I was hoping that it was directing motorists to the most confusing traffic interchange in Great Britain. Deor (talk) 20:56, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, there's a picture of a "Pictish Trail" sign on the download from the page above [2] - scroll down to page 2. Alansplodge (talk) 10:35, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

We have a version of the same abstract knot symbol seen in that PDF file at File:Celtic-knot-insquare-green-transparentbg.svg... AnonMoos (talk) 10:52, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

The white van?

In the article File:The Antelope, Sparkhill.jpg, does anybody know about the white van? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.225.184.114 (talk) 03:48, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I added a link to the photo here for you. -> It looks like an old Toyota LiteAce perhaps (compare [3] for a slightly later model)? Or was there something else about it you wanted to know? FiggyBee (talk) 03:58, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

governing power

As I recall at some point in English history the Monarchy became a virtual relic of the past requiring referral for decision making from the House of Commons unlike in the US where the President retains a modest but highly restricted amount of Executive power dependent upon referral by the Congress. For instance, while the president can order the executive branch to operate more efficiently the President can not abandon entitlements or spend more than authorized by Congress. For England this makes the existence of the Monarchy largely a ceremonial artifact retained as a matter of continuity in the minds of Britishers with their past. I America the Presidency seems to be going the same way even when it comes to immediate power in the presence of the computer age where all but two or three choice have been weeded out. How long will it be before computers completely rule the world due to their ability to handle far more variables than humans? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.100.3.207 (talk) 04:21, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

What have checks and balances of the executive powers of the UK and the US got to do with computers "ruling the world"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:24, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Computers take in the information we give them, process it in the way we've programmed them to, and then spit out something with which we (or the President) can do as we like; they're in no position to rule anything. On the other hand, I guess what you're getting at is that it's getting harder for the President to make unilateral decisions based on available information, since there's so much more available information than there was before modern communications technology. Is that right? If so, I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I for one welcome our new robot overlords. FiggyBee (talk) 04:30, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. Kent Brockman. StuRat (talk) 04:50, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I see we have some fans of The Day the Earth Stood Still. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:54, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

You must be referring Gort. A lovable character if any. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 05:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Take that guy to school with you, and nobody would mess with you. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:13, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I'll give you an example that is personal and diet related. I have a spreadsheet program that will accept either the amount of CO2 and Oxygen I've burned to determine my TEE or accept body and activity measurements. From there is looks at the nutrients and energy available from various foods and selected for me a balanced diet that will target my desired waist. It is far more accurate than I am at deciding the best foods and amount I should eat so I have turned over my decision making as to the foods and amounts to a computer. I supply the data and it responds with the decision and I'm beginning to loose weight to achieve the target waist line. It is is charge of my diet and no longer me. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 05:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Is it holding a gun to your head and ordering you to follow its conclusions? No, I didn't think so. You are deciding based on its conclusions. It's not deciding anything. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

After edit conflict... its making my dietitian send me smiles instead of pulling out the NAZI flogging whip. Boy, I hate that thing. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 05:18, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Who put the data in the spreadsheet? All its doing is comparing numbers and coming up with the closest match; you could do it (and, no doubt, dieticians did used to do it) on a piece of paper almost as easily as on a computer. FiggyBee (talk) 08:02, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

In the past I relied upon dieticians but found they no longer could compete with the accuracy and reliability of the spreadsheet program. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 03:47, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Your point is not bad. If somebody could code up all the decisions that could ever be made by an airline pilot, for example, it would be tempting to have this ostensibly error-free software fly our airplanes. A major problem with putting our trust in software is that software is just a great big giant list of steps that a human has typed in. It is like an enormous recipe in a cookbook, only it has a million steps in it instead of just 20. Because of this, all software has bugs. (Pedants like me will say that Hello World and other extremely simple software does not; fine; I'm talking about software that people use.) There will inevitably be mistakes that are made, because constructing virtually any useful piece of software is probably more complicated and more tricky internally than the construction of Hoover Dam. For this reason, humans are unlikely to turn over their decision making powers — over important decisions, anyway — to software, which in the end is just a fallible and error-prone list of steps written originally by other humans. Comet Tuttle (talk) 05:16, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I understand that the most recent airliners are already run on autopilot nearly all the time, including landing and possibly take-off. 89.242.144.8 (talk) 11:21, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Modern aircraft can have the autopilot active from takeoff to rollout (providing the landing airport has the necessary equipment), yes. However, an autopilot doesn't mean the pilots are kicking back and not paying attention; there's still plenty to do, and if anything even slightly out of the ordinary happens it's strictly hands-on. Autoland has existed since the mid 1960s, but almost all landings are still done by hand, because it's safer, more enjoyable and easier for the pilots. FiggyBee (talk) 13:25, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Many pilots put their trust in God whenever there is a mechanical problem they can not remedy and certainly in physics. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 05:33, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

There's also the problem that humans are still far better than machines at evaluating and reacting to emergent or unique situations. A computer can only take a set of conditions and respond with a programmed set of responses. It can go through a very large number of conditions, even some very rare ones, and it can do so much faster than humans, but it lacks the ability to think creatively or improvise. So the problem is not that machines can't be programmed to respond to an astounding number of possible situations, its that it can't be programmed to respond to a situation that no one has ever thought of before because it has never happened. I still trust the ability of a human to be able to improvise in a unique situation than a computer would. See 2001: A Space Odyssey for a fictional treatment, but a reasonable one, about what happens when a computer is faced with making human-like decisions. --Jayron32 05:34, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

For not-thought-of-yet- events there is neural networking which operates very nearly to the human brain. The difference is that it can be fed by sensors humans might only dream of. 71.100.3.207 (talk) 06:02, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Speaking as a pilot, any pilot who just "puts their trust in God" when something goes wrong is not someone I want to fly with. The ability to work through complex and unforeseen situations is exactly why we still have very highly trained people flying planes, and not computers. As for "neural networks", perhaps you should read our article? They're little more than a statistical tool. 2001 may have come and gone, but true HAL-like artificial intelligence is still a thing of science fiction (and I can't help but wonder, if a computer is ever created with the capacity to reason as subtly as a human can, with all the nuances, doubts and guesswork that goes with that, whether it won't prove to be no faster or more accurate at it than we are). FiggyBee (talk) 08:02, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Test pilot Chuck Yeager has said there is no substitute for knowing one's aircraft thoroughly, a factor which saved him from disaster on occasion. I also wonder how a computer and/or a pilot "putting his trust in God" would have handled the "Miracle on the Hudson". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Namaste (The Buddha in me salutes the Buddha in you). --TammyMoet (talk) 16:03, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

"You can fly on a wing and a prayer, if you like. As for me, I'll put my faith in two wings." StuRat (talk) 14:44, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Although manual override is present in many otherwise autonomous sitiatuions (Gout's destruction of man made Earth was certainly cancelled) the point is that there remain a growing number of instances where manual overide takes a bit more doing than just surviving the bites of a few flying bio-mechanical bugs.) 71.100.3.207 (talk) 03:54, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Also see Expert system, which is an attempt to have software act like a human expert would. Is your 1986 Toyota Corolla emitting smoke from the passenger-side air vent, and there is a blinking red light on the dashboard? Just consult the expert system and follow its instructions to fix the problem. (My observation above still holds, about the problem of software bugs.) Comet Tuttle (talk) 14:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Citations and copyright infringement

I'd like to cite a non-free work published in the United States. I'd like to cite it on this here English Wikipedia. I assume that citing a few sentences is not a problem, but that citing an entire chapter is. Where is the line between a copyright infringement and a permissible citation? I am in Germany, although that's probably irrelevant. kthxbye 84.46.72.106 (talk) 06:35, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

It's pretty vague; see our article Fair use, and in particular the section "Amount and substantiality". In practice, whether a particular instance is acceptable depends on whether it is challenged and, if it is, on the judge's interpretation of the case. Note, however, that one of the criteria used in establishing fair use is "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes". That might seem to give a nonprofit educational project such as Wikipedia a little leeway, but in fact excessive copying tends to be frowned on around here. I myself have trouble seeing why any quotation longer than a few sentences would need to be used in a WP article; "summarize the information and cite the source" seems to be the most useful practice for writing encyclopedia articles. Deor (talk) 12:04, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Citing by itself does not have any copyright implications (it just means giving a reference). Quoting does, though. But in most cases, if the amount of the quote is small compared to the volume of the entire work (one paragraph out of a very long book, for example), and it is being used in a scholarly-like way (not just, say, in a novel of yours), then it almost certainly (as much as one can say this) falls under fair use. If you are quoting, say, 50% of a poem, then you're in more problematic territory. If you are doing this for works of fiction, generally speaking publishers want everything bought and paid for, even very small excerpts (because publishers are afraid of getting sued). There is no hard and fast line, though. It is about the accumulation of past case law and the judgment of a judge. But the case law suggests very strongly that in most cases, a few sentences for the purpose of something like Wikipedia is fine. --Mr.98 (talk) 13:59, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, maybe not quite: "in most cases" after all! Copyright infringement may sometimes be hard to avoid without complete rewriting. See: Wikipedia:Close_paraphrasing#Example and maybe: Wikipedia:Copy-paste. (User:Blurpeace pointed them out for me, after I had asked a similar question on irc earlier today).
--Seren-dipper (talk) 17:30, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you for your helpful comments, links, and the correction – yes, I want to quote, not just mention the title and the author. I am not going to use it in an actual Wikipedia article, and I don't want to rephrase. As Wikipedia content including non-article spaces can be reused commercially, and as the sentences I'd like to quote – while not amounting to a substantial part quantitatively – are not from the book's abstract, but from its conclusive part, I'm going to cut them down to less than I would otherwise like to post. OP = 84.46.46.174 (talk) 22:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Penis sizes in statues and paintings

Why is it that most old sculptures (like Italian) have small penises, yet in other works such as paintings there are overly large penises (Pompeii)? Were smaller or larger penises more preferable, or was that opinion divided among everyone? I've read stuff saying a smaller package was better for soldiers, or that smaller penises were intentionally sculpted to not destroy others ego's. And then you see paintings from the same area and time period with monster dicks.

Just curious as to what they thought about penis sizes that long ago (most now think bigger is better). I'm mainly asking for BC Italians, but comparing to other cultures is a definate bonus. 65.4.166.7 (talk) 10:26, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Here's a quote which sums up the Athenian view:

"Large sex organs were considered coarse and ugly, and were banished to the domains of abstraction, of caricature, of satyrs, and of barbarians." -The reign of the phallus: sexual politics in ancient Athens by Eva C. Keuls p.68

-Pollinosisss (talk) 10:54, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The overly large penis paintings in Pompeii are of Priapus (the article has a few images from Pompeii). Otherwise the Romans (being rather prudish) didn't really paint penises...the Greeks were generally less prudish, but as Pollinosisss' quote says, also not too interested in realism. They also had abstract penis sculptures. Adam Bishop (talk) 11:36, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Human penis size#Historical perceptions has a bit on the matter. You might also want to look at the Straight Dope reference included therein. Deor (talk) 11:48, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I would disagree that the Romans were prudish. The erotic art in Pompeii and Herculaneum, as well as the many erotic passages in the works of authors like Martial, Catul and Ovid tells a different story. It is correct though that most of the depictions of large penises, phalli, was connected to a popular myth that it could ward off evil eye (on many streetcorners in Pompeii you can find phallic signs that had this function), and Priapus was also a general symbol of prosperity, and as such these particular depictions may not primarily have been of a sexual or pornopgraphic nature. --Saddhiyama (talk) 15:10, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

One can be prudish on one point and not another. —Tamfang (talk) 16:14, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

And some individuals can be prudish while others are not - Ovid, definitely not, but he was exiled by Augustus, who definitely was. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:31, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Tail gunner

I was watching a show in which a tail gunner, reminiscing about the Battle of Midway, spoke about having to take care that he didn't shoot his own plane's tail. Then I remembered Sean Connery's character doing just that in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (so it must be true). Nobody was able to come up with a way to prevent this? Did anybody do such a thing in real life? Clarityfiend (talk) 17:49, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

They did, the interrupter gear. Although our article is mostly about firing through one's own propeller, a similar mechanism can be used to retard the firing of a machine gun when it's pointing to a place defined by a template. Black Tuesday Over Namsi by Earl J. McGill says "although B-29 turrets were fitted with mechanical interrupters to prevent gunners from firing into their own wings or tail surfaces [there was nothing to stop them shooting other planes in the same formation]". This says a Halifax had the same kind of thing. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:08, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The B-17 didn't have a gun in a position where it could shoot the tail. The Indian Jones movie plane is a german one (I don't remember what kind). Some other American bombers may have been similarly configured. PvsKllKsVp (talk) 21:06, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The guy on the show was one of the few TBD Devastator survivors. Clarityfiend (talk) 22:19, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

That's a rear gunner, not a tail gunner. It's just a guy with a 30cal machine gun on a pintle - it's all a rather rudimentary (and you'd have to suspect rather ineffectual) arrangement. So there's little scope for a mechanism that would restrain the motion of the gun or prevent it firing when pointed at something useful. Things are very different on a heavy bomber like a B29, where the turret is electrically operated - it's a heavy, sophisticated machine with scope for adding clever gadgets. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 22:44, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

cars in Egypt

Is there a website where I can find any information about which type of cars does an average Egyptian drive like for example Citroen old or new? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sonic The Xtreme (talk • contribs) 20:23, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I was unable to find any sorry. People arne't replying because they cna't find any either.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 19:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

With a little help...

In the discussion of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band's cover, it states, "At the edge of the scene is a Shirley Temple doll wearing a sweater in homage to the Rolling Stones". I don't get the connection. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:09, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think there is a connection as such. Just that there's a doll or photo or something, on the right edge, that's wearing a sweater saying "Welcome the Rolling Stones". Possibly a bit of an inside joke. But I bet there's many a website that goes into depth about it. I'll see if I can find anything. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:18, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Googling ["sgt. pepper" "shirley temple" "rolling stones"] gives a lot of references that pretty much all say the same thing, that it's a doll made by someone named Jann Haworth, apparently a crew member of the photo shoot. Some sources claim the shirt says "Welcome the Rolling Stones, Good Guys", but I don't see any "good guys" dealie there. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:26, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

The "GOOD GUYS" is on the sleeve - the "good" is in red and the "guys" is in white, so it doesn't show up well on the stripes. In fact, there may be something on the right sleeve as well, but it's mostly turned away from the camera. If you do an image search, there are some really large scans on the net (not linked here for copyright concerns). Matt Deres (talk) 02:28, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

April 11

Daughters of Rebekah

Is the International Association of Rebekah Assemblies identical to the "Daughters of Rebekah"? A chapter of the latter organization was founded in Ansonia, Ohio in 1894, but I don't know how widespread this group was; we don't have an article on it, and Daughters of Rebecca is a redirect to the entirely unrelated Rebecca Riots. I notice that there's an external link at the International Association article for a Daughters cemetery symbol, but there's no source given for saying that they're the same group. Nyttend (talk) 01:11, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

A bit of googling would suggest you're right: the IARA is just an umbrella organization for the various DOR groups. This history of the Idaho Rebekahs says the movement began in Baltimore, Maryland in 1851 as an honorary degree whose recipients were known as "Daughters of Rebekah", and was formalized into its own lodge system from 1868. The existing IARA article could use an expansion to clarify its history, plus a redirect from Daughters of Rebekah. I'll see if I can make a start. Karenjc 18:22, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

displacement

Most contries have policies which accept immigrants. In rare cases it seems that native peoples are overwhelmed and at risk of job, resource and political displacement by immigrants due to the very policies which native peoples have allowed. Examples range from displacement of American Indian culture by European settlers and the displacement of workers from Turkey in Germany not to mention the displacement of indentured servants and others by African Americans as the result of civil war. Does the Wikipedia have a list of such displacements? 71.100.3.207 (talk) 03:43, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

The Holly And The Olive?

[4]

Is the left branch Holly?174.3.123.220 (talk) 04:50, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It looks more like holly than the right branch does. Check out holly. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:53, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Looks more like (a conventional representation of) oak to me, with rounded leaf-lobes and yellow acorns. Holly would have pointy leaves and red berries. —Tamfang (talk) 06:46, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

See "The 1839 National Arms and Seal" about halfway down this page. I have no idea why the modern group uses a white oak (?) branch rather than the original live oak branch, unless it's to distinguish the seal from the current state seal. Deor (talk) 10:07, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

By the way, a properly-formatted link to the image description page would be File:Republic-of-texas.png, and you can look at other emblems derived from the same historic source at File:Republicseal.jpg, File:State Seal of TexasFixed.svg, File:Seal of Texas.svg, or File:State Seal of Texas.png , and a photo of the floor mosaic is at File:Floor of Texas capitol.JPG... AnonMoos (talk) 10:14, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Cargo Cult cooking and manufacturing

Are there any articles that mention the following instances in reference to Cargo Cult as being merely imitations of the real thing?

• Many flea market based hardware vendors sell a drill chuck key that looks like a standard steel drill chuck key but which is poured from pot metal.
• Street vendors sell food dishes that attempt to duplicated food dishes made from the right ingredients in the right proportions but which lack the right ingredients and proportions.
• Costume jewelry.

71.100.3.207 (talk) 05:24, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know the answer. But if I saw a reference to 'Cargo Cult' in a discussion of any of these I would certainly question it, if not delete it outright. --ColinFine (talk) 09:02, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

None of those are good examples of cargo cults. They are signs of incompetence, fraud, or possibly bad taste, but that is not nearly the same thing. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 09:09, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Presumably invoking the meaning expressed in the article as "From time to time, the term 'cargo cult' is invoked as an English language idiom to mean any group of people who imitate the superficial exterior of a process or system without having any understanding of the underlying substance". So "Cargo cult programming" is mentioned in the classic Jargon File, and we even have a Wikipedia article on it -- but 71.100.3.207's questions would appear to refer to more simple imitation... AnonMoos (talk) 10:26, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

The people who make a wear costume jewelry do not misunderstand what jewelry is. Cargo cults are not distinguished by their imitations, but by their misunderstandings. So a cargo cult lemonade stand would consist of something that superficially looked like a lemonade stand, with its operators hoping that money would accumulate into a large glass jar they had set out, but sold no lemonade, and was in an area with no possible customers. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:24, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Online poker in the USA

I thought online poker was illegal in the US, so how do the poker sites mentioned (green tick/check) here operate in the US? http://www.pokerscout.com/ Thanks 84.13.169.129 (talk) 10:21, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

We have an article Southern District of New York Action Against Online Poker Players... AnonMoos (talk) 10:50, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

The online gambling companies operate from other countries and sell their services online to US gamblers. They accept international payments using credit cards and online payment systems, and the countries they operate from are happy that they continue. One US law-enforcement technique has been to prosecute managers and owners of these companies as they pass through the US - this was the case for the executives of BetonSports (a British-registered company which operated from various Caribbean countries). A second strand was the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act, part of the SAFE Port Act. That makes it a crime for US companies (like banks and credit card companies) to "facilitate" online gambling by people in the is. It's due to this that Mastercard and Visa have begin to decline charges by such gambling companies. The ongoing US restriction on online gambling has led Antigua, the EU, and I think some other parties to take the US to the World Trade Organisation, where they've won a ruling which says the US laws restrict foreign countries' access to the US gambling market, protecting it for US gambling concerns (chiefly those based in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, and on various riverboats and Native American reservations). I don't believe any of the originating countries will extradite someone to the US based on a request for breach of US gambling laws. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:08, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Would it be true to say that the gambling section of the Safe Port Act is merely to project the interests of the established American casinos? Because that's how it seems from this side of the pond. (Oooh, I can hear the CIA file being opened on my internet address). 78.146.60.36 (talk) 08:05, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

From the U.S. legal point of view, gambling is basically a matter for the individual states, and each state regulates gambling how it sees fit within its own borders. (The federal government is mainly involved when gambling crosses state lines, or is mixed with organized crime activities.) To be fully legal in the U.S., an on-line gambling operation would have to be officially taxed, licensed, and subject to regulatory oversight in each and every separate state which it accepts bets from. The U.S. is not about to abandon state-by-state supervision of gambling (which is in part Constitutionally-based) just because of a WTO ruling (which can be easily presented as "pro-vice" within the U.S. political context). AnonMoos (talk) 10:01, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

From what little I know about it, the WTO sees the above as an excuse for protectionism. 78.146.30.179 (talk) 14:23, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

How do some online gambling companies keep on in business in the USA, when the senior staff of one or two foriegn gambling companies have been arrested and imprisoned when setting foot on US soil? Why dosnt the US government close down the ones still operating in the US? 78.146.107.183 (talk) 20:30, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Are there online gambling companies based in the US? Can you give an example? --Tango (talk) 20:33, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The website at the top of this question says some are still operating in the US. Poker Stars, Full Tilt Poker, Cereus, Cake Poker, Bodog, Everleaf, Merge, Yatahay, WSEX, First Fidelity, Legendz, and Betraiser. I suppose that might or might not imply that they are based in countries outside the US, but still opwerating in the US as the US government is unable to block their websites, and that they cannot extradite the company execs to the US. Or maybe they are operating openly in the US, but the US only imprisons execs from foriegn countries. 84.13.164.38 (talk) 23:29, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Chief Rabbi of Yugoslavia, 1938

...was Dr. Ignaz Schlang, according to the popular Yiddish-language illustrated weekly, Yidishe Bilder (1938, No. 1). The Encyclopedia Judaica (16:874) notes that a Chief Rabbinate was instituted in Yugoslavia in 1923, and that between 1924 and 1941, Dr. Yitzhak Alkalay served in that post, and no mention of any Ignaz Schlang. It's possible that there were two chief rabbis as in today's Israel, but my leads have fizzled out. Suggestions? -- Deborahjay (talk) 12:59, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It looks like the BCS spelling of the names is Ignjat Šlang and Isak Alkalaj.

On page 27 of this PDF it says: "Before WWII there were many rabbis in Belgrade. The chief rabbi for the Sephardic community was Dr. Isak Alkalaj, and for the Ashkenazi community Ignjat Slang."

I also found this page which calls Dr. Alkalaj the "Supreme Rabbi" (vrhovni rabin) and Dr. Šlang the "Chief Rabbi" (nadrabin). --Cam (talk) 18:45, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

What goes on a person meditating?

What are people thinking at, when meditating? I know that some are counting, but which are the options? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Quest09 (talk • contribs) 17:24, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

You'll find some answers (though probably not all of them!) at Meditation. --ColinFine (talk) 17:28, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I actually found none answer. Not even something about the counting.--83.57.70.63 (talk) 17:33, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the idea is to suspend logical thought. There are many ways to do this. Counting might be one, since it requires just enough brain power to distract you from complex thought. Repeating a certain word or phrase (mantra) until it loses all meaning might be another. And then there's contemplating a question that has no answer, like "Can God create a boulder so large that not even He can move it ?". StuRat (talk) 17:43, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

One cannot stop thinking. In meditation one tries to reduce fretful thinking and prepare one's state of mind for thoughts that are observed with a degree of detachment, even if with an awareness that they are one's own thoughts, and that their implications are personal. Techniques are supposedly available for escaping from concern with one's material well-being and for seeing with clarity one's thoughts. Bus stop (talk) 17:55, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

that's not strictly true. The goal of meditation is to recognize (viscerally) that thought is a tool not an essential part of your being. In the early stages of a meditation practice, thoughts will always occur: this is because the mind gets bored, and because it's bored it manufactures problems or worries, and thoughts enter to try to deal with the problems or worries that the mind manufactured. For instance, sometimes when I meditate I will suddenly find myself wondering what I'm going to have for lunch - a totally trivial worry that only cropped up because the mind was looking for something to do. there are any number of ways of addressing this, usually by giving the mind something truly simplistic to occupy itself with (like counting breaths, reciting mantras, scanning the body), or by stepping back and examining the thoughts as objects that arise rather than becoming immersed in them. after a while, though (it could be a very long while, if you have a heavy mind), the mind realizes that it doesn't need to have problems or worries, so it stops making them and thoughts stop arising. then you get moments of nice clarity where you are not doing anything except sitting. very refreshing. --Ludwigs2 19:45, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It depends. There are various methods, like counting. See shikantaza for a method that aims toward not "thinking" at all. But, I think that most people who meditate are mostly thinking about how much longer it will be before they can stop, or, in close competition, daydreaming. Pfly (talk) 09:52, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Percentage of non-white blood in American whites?

European Americans have been living with many different races in the US for a long time, therefore I suppose that miscegenation must have occurred. So, what's the average percentage of non-white ancestry in "European Americans" nowadays? --Belchman (talk) 18:20, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

How could such a thing be known? Bus stop (talk) 18:32, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

If, for the sake of argument, you date the beginning of serious European settlement in America to the Mayflower landing in 1620, that's only 11 generations back. Each current living American, if you go back 11 generations, has 2048 9th-great-grandparents, any of whom might have been of another race, or might have had children by someone of another race, or might themselves have ancestors who were, or who had children with, someone of another race. Your "European Americans" would not be racially homogeneous in 1620 anyway, since interracial relationships appear in written history thousands of years before the colonization of the Americas. And if you go back far enough, we all come from the same place. "Miscegenation" is ultimately a meaningless term, whether you ignore its offensive baggage or not. Karenjc 19:36, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

We don't know what his political views are so no need to critize them. He could be using this in an anti-racism argument for all we know. Anyway see White_American#Admixture. Human beings have no "races" anyway, there are very very few species that do. Just arbitrary characteristics shared by some groups.--92.251.143.238 (talk) 20:06, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Ahem... I didn't criticize anyone's political views as far as I can see, just offered some statistics and pointed out that "miscegenation" can be viewed as a loaded term, as stated clearly in the lead section of our article Miscegenation. Karenjc 13:45, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm aware that "human races" don't make much sense scientifically, but certain haplogroups and other traits can be traced. For example, I remember reading somewhere on Wikipedia that most Argentines had a tiny bit of Amerindian blood. I don't see how can this be offensive to anyone but a racist, sorry. --Belchman (talk) 20:49, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

And thank you for your replies :) --Belchman (talk) 20:51, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Minor quibble, I'd have said 15 to 16 generations, using a generation length (average age of mother at birth) of 25 years rather than 35. So that's 32768 or 65536 ancestors! FiggyBee (talk) 01:32, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

There are some companies who will carry out a DNA test to trace an individual's ancestry through many generations. The genetic genealogy article might help you search for the kind of companies that provide this service. I have no idea if this is likely, but if one of these companies has tested a statistically significant sample of "American whites" you could ask them directly if they would be prepared to release statistical data to you. Astronaut (talk) 20:39, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

It's unlikely that the for-profit companies would share such data with you. Better luck would be books by population geneticists that look at this sort of thing—Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza's work might have something on this. In any case, this is really more appropriately a Science Desk question, if you are concerned about genetic measurements... --Mr.98 (talk) 01:42, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I guess you are right - I should have posted this in the Science Desk - since people here think that this kind of thing can't be known or would be very difficult - certainly, it would be very difficult if you did a "social" study - but actually it's very easy to discern non-European genes in a European population - obviously, using a genetic study. --Belchman (talk) 10:48, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, even that is difficult, to be honest. There aren't generally European and non-European genes. What there are are certain genes that are statistically higher in pre-defined populations. So you say, "these people, we are going to call them 'white Europeans', and these people we are going to call 'Asians'" or whatever. This is hard to do with modern populations in many cases because from the beginning you are applying non-biological categories your groups (you are screening out people who are not fitting into your 'white Europeans' category cleanly, e.g. people who obviously look half-white and half something else). So it's problematic, because you're inferring historical genetics from modern populations, and then using that as a model for gene flow. It doesn't make it impossible to draw meaningful conclusions, as some on here would suggest, but it does mean one has to be tentative about the conclusions, and to be aware that there are no "pure races" of any sort. What this kind of research can tell you is about probabilistic measures of gene changes in populations... that's profoundly different than saying that it tells you about how "white" or "Black" people have mixed or something along those lines, which is applying very out-dated "pure-type" racial concepts, which don't have any place in biology. It's one of the reason that these "find out your heritage" tests are often quite bunk. They give people a probabilistic account of some of their genetics, which of course people then take and interpret with entirely non-scientific social categories... the whole thing gets very murky. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:50, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I've already said that I know that the concept of "human races" doesn't make much sense scientifically, that's why I used inverted commas in "European Americans"... To clear things up a little, I came up with this question because of this statement from our article Demographics of Argentina "As it is, since Argentines have mainly European genetic admixture, the non-European signal, which is easily discernible at the genetic level, is also easily masked". --Belchman (talk) 16:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Define "white" please... Spanyards carried moorish blood, Eastern Europeans - turkic and mongolian bloods, Italians amalgamated all the races of the Empire etc. NVO (talk) 06:16, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Not all European Americans have been living with many different races in the US for a long time. My mother's parents both came to America from Finland in the early 20th century. Researching the genealogy is quick and simple--my maternal blood relatives in America are all Finns--or Swede-Finns to be precise. My paternal side is quite different, having come to American Virginia in the 17th century (as an aside note that "serious European settlement in America" did not begin with the Mayflower landing in 1620--serious colonization in Virginia predates the Mayflower by at least a decade). Who knows what "races" (or, perhaps better, "ethnicities") are involved in my paternal line and took place in America. One reason why the question is not easy to answer is the lack of accurate genealogical data across the board. There are many paternal lines like mine, which go back many centuries in America but despite decades or research by dedicated genealogists contain major gaps. I can trace my line back to about 1780 with certainty. The century of so before that is almost entirely lost in terms of primary sources. Was there miscegenation during that period? Maybe. No one knows. This kind of uncertainty is not uncommon, which would make it very difficult to answer the question with confidence and accuracy. Pfly (talk) 10:22, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Defining what "white" is, is slippery. Even the darkest-skinned native of India is typically considered to be "caucasian". I think what the OP might be asking would have more to do with the basic traditional race groups, which could more generally be characterized as "Indo-European", "African", "East Asian" (i.e. "Oriental) and so on. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:09, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd be careful of commercial DNA testing as well, the errors on those things are massive, exciting though it might sound to hear you are x% African and y% Asian or whatever. As someone said, it all depends on how far back you go - back far enough all humans are African. Back even further, all humans are shrew like animals dodging being stamped on my fat dinosaurs! But on the original question I've certainly seen numbers estimated for how many African-Americans have European blood (essentially all, IIRC), so I assume someone could at least estimate. One thing to bear in mind is that under US law, one drop of Black blood classifies you as Black (One-drop_rule), so technically speaking all white Americans are pure blooded, there just might not be very many of them! 92.14.216.25 (talk) 22:08, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Climate

In the article, British_Asian#Communities, there are cities and searched them for the climate thet have and not all have info about climate. Where can I find info about these cities' climate? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Sonic The Xtreme (talk • contribs) 21:40, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

Here's a link to the article you mentioned: British_Asian#Communities. StuRat (talk) 22:41, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

I sometimes use this site; you can use the search to find information about the communities. Intelligentsium 23:55, 11 April 2010 (UTC)

That article seems to sort of slide past the current issue that for various reasons many non-Muslims feel rather dubious at best about being lumped together with Muslims into some supposed single undifferentiated "Asian community"... AnonMoos (talk) 09:48, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

For non-British readers, the term "Asian" in the UK generally refers to those who are migrants (or descendants of migrants) from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. As AnonMoos says, there's a tendancy to lump tham all together[5]. News items these days tend to specify exactly which Asian community they are taking about.

To answer the original question, there's an overview at Climate of the United Kingdom; we're not a big country, so there aren't huge differences but a few generalisations:-

• The further west you go, the more rainfall you get.
• The further north, the colder you get (but the east is usually cooler than the west).
• The higher above sea level, the colder and wetter you get.

That's why Brits tend to go to the west coast for their holidays but take an umbrella (the sea is a bit warmer there too, but not much!). Hope that helps - was there any particular city? Alansplodge (talk) 18:03, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

April 12

most affluent city in sub-saharan africa

Which city in Sub-Saharan Africa, outside of South Africa, has the highest standard of living? -hello, i'm a member | talk to me! 01:41, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Not an authoritative answer, but I would guess Libreville in oil-rich Gabon, which has the highest per-capital GDP in sub-Saharan Africa, followed by Gaborone in Botswana and Windhoek in Namibia. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 02:30, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Lagos is the most populous city in sub-saharan Africa, and is a huge metro area. Like New York, it would be hard to nail down the character of the entire city in a single concept, but Lagos#Economy indicates it is Nigeria's most "prosperous" city; I would imagine parts of it are quite well off. --Jayron32 06:17, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

List of cities by quality of living, not quite what you asked for, though economy is one factor in the equation, features Port Louis (ranked 77th), even before Cape Town (85th) , and Johannesburg (90th). All three cities seem to surpass any North African city, of which none are featured among the top hundred. Again, this assessment is based on other factors as well, such as environment, personal safety, health, education, transportation, etc. ---Sluzzelin talk 06:43, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Though technically, Port Louis is on an island nation a good distance away from the continent of Africa proper. Sort of similar to stating that the best city in North America is in Bermuda. Googlemeister (talk) 14:30, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Analogically, yes, but is this altogether illegitimate? If we compare Oceania, we realize that a continent is an abstract construct in geography and not narrow physical category...--71.111.229.19 (talk) 10:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Oldest card game still played today?

What is the oldest card game still played in unbroken tradition, albeit having changed over time? I assume Tarot is the answer, but are there other candidates? --KnightMove (talk) 01:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The Whist family of trick-taking card games, which includes such games as bridge and spades can be traced to the 17th century games of Ruff and Honours. Other than superficial differences in such matters as scoring, bidding, and determining trump, the actual play of the cards is virtually identical in all of the various forms, so that particular card game family can easily be traced back some 400 years, maybe longer. --Jayron32 03:06, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Some of those "superficial" differences are not so superficial. On the other hand, as mentioned in the article, the original game of whist is still played today, and that is something like 300 years old with no major changes. But according to the article on Tarot, tarock and tarocchi games, that still doesn't come close to the oldest tarot games. --Anonymous, 05:47 UTC, April 12, 2010.

Basset, progenitor of a closely related class of games of which Faro (the popular game in the old West) and Baccarat are related, has been dated to the mid-15th century Italy, which would make it about as old as as the Tarot games noted above. --Jayron32 06:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Playing_card#Spread_across_Europe_and_early_design_changes indicates that the playing card arrived in, and spread across Europe, sometime in the late 14th century. So that gives us an earliest starting point. Since Tarot games have been dated to not long after that (early 15th century) that may be the limit. --Jayron32 06:05, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

heritage

who are the bantus of africa,also which communities in africa are directly or indirectly related to the Jews?196.202.194.146 (talk) 07:35, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

You could argue that "Bantus" are essentially who people living outside Africa think of as "Africans", see Bantu expansion and Bantu peoples. For your second question, see African Jews. Jørgen (talk) 07:51, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The technical meaning of "Bantu" is someone who speaks one of the languages belonging to a specific language grouping which prevails over much of central, southern, and eastern sub-Saharan Africa (but not western sub-Saharan Africa). AnonMoos (talk) 09:39, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The Lemba are a group of Bantu speakers who claim a history as Jews. Rmhermen (talk) 16:50, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Re indirect relatedness to the Jews, you might find the article Semitic useful. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 21:45, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Albert III of Saxe-Wittenberg, Duke of Lüneburg

I created this article without knowing much, I need some help with some questiions. Was he a reigning Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg? It seems like he should have been since his father Otto was older than his brother Wenceslas I, Duke of Saxe-Wittenberg (Albert's uncle) who inherited the ducal throne after Otto's and Wenceslas' elder brother, Rudolph II's death. One must note that Saxe-Wittenberg didn't have any joint rules or division like its cousin the Saxe-Lauenburgs even if there was more than one son before answering this. --Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 08:59, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

how do I make a work of art that is epic, hyper-novel, groundbreaking, ambitious, engrossing, a world unto itself, without becoming a parody of itself?

When I consider those worlds, like Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings that were extremely ambitious, groundbreaking conceptions of an engrossing, whole world unto itself, what can I do in realizing them that will keep the work from becoming a parody of itself?

Obviously franchises like James Bond have suffered from this for what, thirty years, but even franchises like Indiana Jones, or Back to the Future, suffered from this at their onset, to say nothing of superhero or other comic book ventures.

What positive steps can a person take to keep their work from degenerating into such a parody of itself? Thank you. 84.153.204.187 (talk) 15:04, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that anything that becomes apart of popular culture is open for parody. The only way to keep a work from being parodied is to not offer it to the public in the first place. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 15:45, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the poster means something that is considered to be just ridiculous from the get-go. I think a lot of this is in the eye of the beholder. My wife thinks that LOTR is pretty ridiculous even on its own terms (she finds the "richly imagined" world to be ridiculous pretentious). I enjoyed Dune but there's a way in which it puts it on a bit thick too. It's easy to see Star Wars as just being about space wizards who live in the past-future.

When those kinds of works work right, it's not because they have some sort of intricate cosmology behind them. (Any dummy can make an intricate cosmology where the House of Shmurbitts and the House of Florfees have been at war for 500 years, and there are funny Kwoozars and Toolmoos that have their own intricate culture and system of magic, etc.) It's because the larger works resonate it some sort of way with more basic human concerns, needs, conditions. Star Wars isn't good because Lucas has 8 million muppets running around in it, it's good (if it's good) because it contains a nice amount of Jungian archetypes that resonate with a large number of its viewers. LOTR isn't good (if it's good) because there are intricate descriptions of creepy critters, it's good because the writing is (mostly) solid and the "epic quest against evil, even though the odds are pretty impossible" is a strong story. My suggestion is that instead of worrying about the density of the back story, focus on the overall construction of the narrative. Do like George Lucas did: read The Hero with a Thousand Faces, figure out what the inherently human story is you want to tell. The detailed world—that can be filled in later, once you know what is worth filling in. Just my two cents. --Mr.98 (talk) 16:12, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Well-stated. Somewhere there's a wikipedia article that discusses a short list of what could be called "basic story concepts". There are many ways of retelling the same story, and it's not so much the story that matters, it's the presentation. And I would have to say that if a story gets parodied, that's actually a form of flattery. No one parodies something that no one cares about. A parody of Star Wars, such as Hardware Wars, is not a put-down, it's a form of affection. Likewise with Galaxy Quest and Star Trek. Many of those who loved Star Trek (me included) also loved Galaxy Quest. The Indiana Jones movies were an homage to serials, while in some ways making fun of them too. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if no one parodies an artwork, then probably no one much cares about it. As you indicate, you can't control the marketplace of ideas. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:03, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The more immediate danger is that the goal from the outset, a narrative that is designed to be epic, hyper-novel, groundbreaking, ambitious, engrossing, a world unto utself, is already a parody of market-driven motivation: novelty, for example, itself untrustworthy as an end, not being sufficient in this case, which seeks to be hyper-novel.--Wetman (talk) 17:10, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes. That's trying to "control the market", which generally doesn't work. You put it out there, and it either works or it doesn't. As Dick Clark told Congress during the payola investigation in the late 1950s, "No amount of airplay will turn a dud into a hit." And conversely, a work of art might not be recognized as such in the lifetime of its author. The history of the humanities is loaded with individuals who were not "honored in their own time". There are no guarantees... of either success or failure. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:26, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

To my mind, the thing that distinguishes 'epic' art is that it springs out of complete and sophisticated worldview. Tolkien is the iconic example of this - he was actually interested in philosophical matters of the derivations of language and myth, and The Lord of the Rings was a kind of by-product. rather than trying to craft a story, craft a worldview and let the story make itself. --Ludwigs2 18:41, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

In many cases, these massive properties were created by chance, with someone taking a shot at a story and it catching on, continuing, etc. builds until it becomes epic blah-blah-blah on its own. Think Discworld. That hasn't become self-parody and the writing is brilliant, all after 30-something novels (If anything, they've improved and eliminated much of the silliness from the earlier, more parody-of-other-works novels). Aaronite (talk) 17:37, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Works of art can also come into and go out of fashion. Works of art are not immune to fashion trends. An artist should be aware of the criteria considered important but an artist shouldn't be entirely controlled by what the art world "thinks" it wants. Bus stop (talk) 18:54, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Isnt the way to stop it being a parody is to consistently and persistantly always present your work as something deadly serious? Gearge Lucas has never done a comedy version of Star Wars. If other people parody it, then that's a good thing as its a sign that its well known, and it is further promotion. Take Scientology as a random example - bursting with parodiable and laughably riduculous material, yet consistently presented year after year in a deadly serious manner, with the people involved all acting their serious parts, without sniggering. Similarly in fine art - something that anyone could make in five minutes gradually becomes, by the persistance of the artist, accepted as something of value. 78.146.107.183 (talk) 19:48, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps one approach is to be self-referential about epicness in the title itself (as in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius), which takes the piss right from the beginning, so reviewers and readers won't think you're actually pompous ... but there will be that little seed of doubt planted in their minds: Maybe it really will be ... I'd better read it now... Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:23, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Just paraphrase the Icelandic Sagas but set in Outer Space, and Bingo! you have an epic Space Opera. Other works such as the Odyssey, the Illiad, or the more serious plays of Shakespeare could also be used. In the later case you get an automatic approval from critics as they can show how clever they are by recognising the source. 78.149.114.89 (talk) 22:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC) 89.240.34.241 (talk) 20:09, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Reichsmark Conversion

Is there anyway to find out how much M27.75 from 1925 Germany would be today in Dollars or Euros? Thanks 85.244.195.253 (talk) 16:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Because relative prices have changed so much since 1925, there is no way to calculate an exact equivalent to an amount from that date. M27.75 was equal to US$6.61 in 1925. [6] The tricky thing is determining what that $6.61 is worth today. According to this site, that amount is worth $80.90 today in terms of its ability to purchase goods and services. However, relative to unskilled wages, it is worth around $300. That is, since an unskilled worker today might make around $400 a week, M27.75 probably represented a large share of a week's earnings in 1925. Once you decide which present-day dollar value is more relevant, you can convert to euros if you like at today's rate of about $1.358 to the euro, per this site. Marco polo (talk) 18:05, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply... Extremely helpful 85.244.195.253 (talk) 20:46, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

William "Bart" Bush

Cannot find any info on William "Bart" Bush, the Regional Commissioner of the National Capital Region in the Public Buildings Service of the U.S. General Services Administration. I searched Google and Wikipedia with various versions of the commissioner's name. All in vain.Punctilious-one (talk) 18:59, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

google 'William B. "Bart" Bush'. --Ludwigs2 19:58, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Co-signer removal ____?

Co-signer removal ____________________. Can someone fill that line in. I need to know. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 206.176.81.22 (talk • contribs) Moved from Co-signing by Tanner Swett (talk) 20:13, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

You need to explain the context. Where did you read this? Is it at the bottom of a legal document, for example, or is it the answer in a crossword puzzle? Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:47, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Homosexuality = Paedophilia? Studies?

According to Secretary of State of the Vatican City, Tarcisio Bertone, "many psychologists, many psychiatrists have proved that there is no relation between pedophilia and celibacy, but many others have proved, and have recently told me, that there is relation between homosexuality and pedophilia". I want to know, are these studies known?, who are those psychologists and psychiatrists? The news is in Spanish because it's breaking news and I didn't find it in English yet. Source --SouthAmerican (talk) 21:37, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Not what you asked for directly, but here's one editorial from The Atlantic about why this argument is a smokescreen, and that "the sin is the abuse of power, and the use of religious authority to subject the defenseless to an adult's sexual gratification," and that "the sexual orientation of the perpetrator is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to the matter at hand". Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:28, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Here's the story in English from Reuters. What a shitty shitty man is State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone. What a shitty shitty church. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:34, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

• This is not a forum for debate or soapboxing. --Anonymous, 04:40 UTC, April 13, 2010.

In part, at least. For the Church, or anyone affiliated with it, to be defending pedophilia or homosexuality or any other type of sexual behavior, on the grounds that it somehow doesn't violate the celibacy rules, is highly offensive. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:49, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the church is defending their celibacy rules from the assertion that they cause priest to engage in homosexual or pedophilic behavior (not defending pedophilia, as you've read it). Buddy431 (talk) 23:00, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

The celibacy rules do not "cause" priests to engage in this stuff. However, the rules might tend to attract the kind of man who has no desire for sex with women. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:13, 12 April 2010 (UTC)

Google Scholar is a good place to look for studies pedophilia+homosexuality and pedophilia+celibacy. Of course pedophilia is related to homosexuality, just as it is also related to heterosexuality, so every study is going to make reference to the gender of the victim and abuser but less frequently celibacy part of the equation. You would have to ask him what these conveniently comforting to the vatican, studies are meltBanana 00:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There are lots of ways to slice and dice this, but the research seems to indicate that openly gay men are much less likely to engage in pedophilia than men who identify as straight or heterosexual. It seems plausible that these Church officials are trying to divert attention from their own moral bankruptcy by attempting to scapegoat gay people. Marco polo (talk) 01:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Somewhat in concurrence although I don't really want to come across as soapboxing but although the CC likes to bring the issue of homosexuality into it, I've never seen any real evidence that many of the CC abusers can be considered 'homosexual' even if you include paedophiles who are attracted to prepubuscent boys and/or ephebophiles who are attracted to postpubscent boys in the that definition. While it may be true most of the victims are (post-pubsecent/young teen) boys, obvious things like access issues (altar boys etc and the lower acceptance of a teenage girls spending a lot of time with an adult male, even a priest, then teenage boys spending time with an adult male) and perhaps also a lower 'acceptance' of sexual abuse of girls by society (and the corresponding easier ability for the victim to speak out) and the CC, would seem to be big confounding factors that have never been addressed by the CC that I've noticed. (Similar to the way many prison rapists are men who have sex with men but probably don't have a homosexual orientation.) Of course the CC perhaps doesn't even always recognise the distinction given the views of some of their members on a homosexual identity so perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Edit: To make this less soapboxy, here are some sources touching on these issues [7] [8]. Ironically I'm guessing the CC uses this sort of research to prove their point about how most of the priests aren't paedophiles and how they are only a very small number etc yet ignores the other key point is that there is no link with homosexuality and most don't identify as homosexual... Nil Einne (talk) 18:59, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

• Vatican Statement Regarding Comments by Card. Bertone
  • Interview with Scicluna --88.66.204.235 (talk) 17:13, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

• The Roman Catholic Church has done more to protect paedophiles and silence their victims than pretty much any other organization, even NAMBLA, while at the same time actively promoting prejudice and discrimination against gay men. It's no surprise that they should try to deflect attention from their own profound immorality by attacking their traditional whipping boys. DuncanHill (talk) 17:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

April 13

Muslim clothing

What justification is used by European countries which ban Muslim women from wearing the clothing required by their religion? They aren't harming anyone, after all. --70.129.184.122 (talk) 01:13, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Such clothing is not really required by their religion, it's more of a traditional custom. Occasionally someone argues that headscarves and veils should be banned because it violates women's human rights, but more often the reason is apparently simple xenophobia. People fear the unknown, and at the moment Islam is equated with terrorism, so anyone in a veil could potentially blow you up. It's funny, Catholic canon law used to be full of rules that Muslims and Jews should dress differently, so Christians could tell them apart and avoid intermingling with them. And now Europeans want them to be as dissimilar as possible. Adam Bishop (talk) 02:25, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This is happening in Quebec as well, and the justification is to 'protect' their identity and make sure there is no fraud when requesting public services. And yet, they permit absentee ballots for elections by mail. It's all a big load, if you ask me, but this isn't the place for opinions... Aaronite (talk) 02:29, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This really only applies (at least in Quebec) to the niqab and burqa where the face is partially or totally covered. And how often do you see that in Europe or North America? Personally I have only ever seen one person wearing a niqab, and never a burqa. It's hardly a big problem, but it distracts people from more important things they probably won't be able to understand anyway. Adam Bishop (talk) 02:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

See the articles (and where they lead) listed under Category:Islamic dress controversy in Europe. For Quebec, see accommodation for Muslim headgear Another one at Europe's border: Headscarf controversy in Turkey. ---Sluzzelin talk 02:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

We also have Hijab by country, including a short section on Europe. Turkey's always the one that gets me. It's not xenophobia, but rather a clash of internal cultures. And to answer the original question, some people do believe that headgear does harm others. In Turkey's case, Ataturk believed that headscarves prevented Turkey from modernizing. Buddy431 (talk) 04:40, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

We also have Reasonable accommodation (for the Canadian perspective). Earlier I was thinking of sumptuary law, which has some more links specific to clothing. Adam Bishop (talk) 05:10, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There are different aspects. One is the (somewhat, but not completely, patronising) argument that (most) women would not wear this clothing voluntarily, but only because of social or family pressure. Or, if they wear it voluntarily, it's only because of their cultural conditioning, and they wouldn't if only they knew better (you can see where the patronising comes in ;-). For school teachers, another argument is that teachers should not be an example for lifestyles associated with a strongly non-egalitarian society. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 08:30, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

See divide and rule, though that's just my opinion. A couple of quotes: Daniel Bacquelaine, the Belgian MP behind the bill there: "Wearing the burqa in public is not compatible with an open, liberal, tolerant society.", and Nicolas Sarkozy: "The all-body veil is contrary to the dignity of women. The answer is to ban it" [9]. I think the case being made by most people in favour of a ban is that wearing the veil is damaging in some way to society as a whole, that it facilitates some kinds of fraud, and that it is something imposed on women that restricts their liberty. Tinfoilcat (talk) 09:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Here are some arguments for making wearing a burqa illegal:

1) It hides the identity. This is particularly a problem when women want their driver's license picture to have their face hidden. Such ID is worse than worthless, as anyone can use it and claim to be that person. So, basically those women would have no ID at all. This just doesn't work in a modern society.

2) Terrorism. Suicide bombers wearing such loose clothing can hide a lot of explosives and kill many people. Since the identity is concealed, even a man and/or someone the guards would recognize as a terrorist could get close to their target.

3) Integration into society. In order to prevent a polarized society and eventual conflict, some degree of integration within the new society is necessary. This is the "melting pot" concept. Clothing is one aspect, as are language, customs, etc. Perhaps people who are completely unwilling to integrate into the new culture should be kept out. StuRat (talk) 10:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The OP says "They aren't harming anyone, after all". That point is debateable, since they are harming the woman who has to wear the thing. Women who wear it are excluded from most of society and are effectively owned by men. 78.147.232.11 (talk) 11:59, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

So where does that leave women who choose to wear the veil as a sign of their faith? Astronaut (talk) 13:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I have known Muslim women in the workplace who are very strong and assertive, yet wear a headscarf (though not a veil) as an indicationg of faith and modesty, and who would take offense to the idea that they are "owned" by men. And as far as that's concerned, how different is that "ownership" from so-called "submission" practiced by some Christian sects? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:21, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

A headscarf is of trivial importance compared to wearing a burqa or a niqāb. 78.149.114.89 (talk) 23:18, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't buy it as part of their religion, as most Muslims don't cover their faces. I believe the Koran only says that "men and women should dress modestly". It's more of a cultural thing, going back to the Arab tribes which predating Islam (along with many other misogynistic practices). That said, many Arab Muslim clerics have tried to incorporate these tribal values into the religion, as this allows them to spread their tribal values to other cultures, as if it was "the will of Allah". StuRat (talk) 13:17, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The whole religious vs. cultural thing is a bit of a straw man though. The Mr. 70.129 could have just as easily asked "why do they try to ban women from wearing clothing related to their cultural heritage" and the question, and answers, would essentially be the same. Buddy432 (talk) 15:14, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

AFAIK no country has or ever will ban any clothes except those that somehow violate decency laws. Schools on the other hand are perfectly within their rights to ban any clothes they wish. Most have school uniforms, and non-religion items such as hats and gloves are banned. If I made up my own religion and claimed that I needed to wear a hat all the time, I still wouldn't be allowed to wear it to school.--92.251.147.169 (talk)

Then I recommend that you read clothing laws by country, sumptuary law and hijab#Governmental enforcement and bans, which cover some of the many occasions where governments have banned clothing which did not violate decency laws. Warofdreams talk 22:36, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

America doesn't have a government?

Russian President Medvedev said in an interview[10] (comparing his own role in Russia with that of PM Putin),

"But I would say the most important and most complicated decisions I have to take myself. So we have the government which has its own competence. America doesn't have a government. The government itself generates the laws. The government is busy with economics and this is a lot of work, I used to work in the government for many years. I was the first deputy of the prime minister..."

I think he is contrasting the US system of a multi-branched entity called the "government" with the Russian system, which I gather is parliamentary, which in turn I think means what they call the "government" is what we'd call the "executive branch", and it functions like an agency that reports to the Parliament, rather than as an equal policy-making branch in its own right. But I still can't quite make sense of the sentence. What does it mean? Thanks. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 06:11, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The Federal Assembly of Russia is the legislature, so more or less equivalent to the United States Congress. The Judiciary of Russia likewise equivalent to the United States Judiciary. But the US Executive branch has no single equivalent Russian branch. The President of the United States is both the head of state and the head of government. In contrast the President of Russia is the head of state and the Prime Minister of Russia is the head of government. Perhaps what Medvedev was getting at by saying "America doesn't have a government" was something like, America doesn't have a head of government separate from its head of state. In Russia the president has to work with the "government"--ie, the prime minister, but in the US there is no equivalent "government" that the president must work with in this way. The issues relating to the Russian president and prime minister having to work together--how to deal with disagreements, responsibility, taking blame or credit, etc--do not come up in the US because a single person is both president and "government". I admit I am guessing here, and would like to hear a more knowledgeable response. Pfly (talk) 09:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

In a multi-party parliamentary system, "the government" typically refers to a coalition of parties which together controls the majority of the legislature, and thus elects the Prime Minister. In the US two-party system, this would just be called "the majority party", and only gets to pick some lesser offices, like Speaker of the House. So, if by "the US has no government", he means "has no ruling coalition of political parties", then that's quite true. StuRat (talk) 10:36, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

From the context, I think it's clear that Medvedev means roughly what Pfly said. He means that Russia has a government (headed by a Prime Minister) as one institution and a President as another institution, and the two have different responsibilities. In America, there is no government separate from the President, because the President is in complete control of the government. In fact, I don't think Russia is really a parliamentary republic, it's more like a semi-presidential one (as our article says), and the president does have substantial power over the government, albeit less so than in the US. But Medvedev is indeed emphasizing the "semi" aspect of it, and that Putin's authority and sphere of competence are separate from his own. Basically, he is being asked "Which one of you two is the boss?", and he is answering that each of them has his own domain. And this is technically true, although I somehow suspect that Russia is especially inclined to emphasize its parliamentarian aspects when Putin is the PM, and its presidential aspects when Putin is the President :).--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:29, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Quibble: There are obviously a few parts of "the government" that the US president does not control, like the Federal judges themselves. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:23, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

In Europe, when we say "the government", we refer exclusively to the ministers and the prime minister. "The Governement" never refers to the whole series of public institutions like the parliament and the judges, only the ministers. Since there are no ministers and no prime minister in the US, Medvedev is correct in the European meaning of "Government", not in the American meaning of the same word. -Lgriot (talk) 00:17, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, that's right. I'm Bulgarian and I wouldn't dream of calling the judicial system part of "the government"; nor would a Russian, a Frenchman or anyone else outside of America, I think. In case there has been a misunderstanding - Medvedev and Gordon Brown do not have official control of the judicial systems, despite the fact that they are "heads" of their respective "governments". An American president has complete control of the "government" in the European (including Russian) sense. --91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

So how do you collectively refer to the whole series of public institutions like the parliament, judges, and ministers ? StuRat (talk) 05:08, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Here in Finland at least we just call the whole thing "valtio", or "the state", which works neatly since we have no state/federal distinction to consider. Ditto in many other continental countries. "Hallitus", or "the government", is the cabinet.--Rallette (talk) 09:07, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

If you irritate and inflame the cabinet, you get lots of important people making lots of hot air. Commonly called halitosis.  :) -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:48, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

"The state" is what Russians, Finns, Bulgarians, British people and probably most other people in the world besides Americans call the entire sphere of public institutions, I think. This does seem to translate to "government" in American parlance. Whereas the non-American meaning of "government" is indeed "cabinet".--91.148.159.4 (talk) 21:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The closest thing in American English to what Europeans would call "a government" is "an administration." The "Obama administration" refers to the president, his cabinet and the people in charge of the executive branch of the state at the time. However, it would be incorrect to refer to the "Obama government" because in the American system, the legislature actually does much of the governing rather than serving as a rubber stamp for the cabinet. Americans outside of political science don't generally use the term "state" to refer to the federal government because a "state" in the U.S. refers to the 50 entities that (along with DC, etc.) make up the country. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

history - John Wilkes Booth, a white supremacist?

I was reading the colfax massacre article and came across the line "This was enough for white supremacist John Wilkes Booth to assassinate Lincoln". This seemed like a bit of a stretch to me-was he actually a white supremacist?

I'm not asking if he was pro-slavery, his article seems to be pretty adament that he was pissed about the whole freeing the slaves thing, I'm asking if he was actually a supremacist.

Thanks in advance. flagitious 07:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I think it would be safe to say Booth was a white supremacist; certainly he shared the widespread belief that the best thing for blacks was life under white rule. From his final letter, printed in the New York times:

"This country was formed for the white, not for the black man. And looking upon African Slavery from the same stand-point held by the noble framers of our constitution, I for one, have ever considered it one of the greatest blessings (both for themselves and us.) Witness heretofore our wealth and power; witness their elevation and enlightenment above their race elsewhere... Yet, Heaven knows, no one would be willing to do more for the negro race than I, could I but see a way to still better their condition."

On the other hand, the sentence in the Colfax massacre article which you quote seems very much exaggerated, implying as it does that this particular decision, giving the vote to a number of black veterans, was the reason for Booth. Accordingly, I shall delete it.--Rallette (talk) 09:29, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't see any distinction between white supremacists and those who endorse black slavery. If there is such a distinction, it's that the white supremacists would settle for less than total slavery, perhaps just segregation or Apartheid. StuRat (talk) 10:25, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Lincoln himself, viewed from today's perspective, was somewhat of a white supremacist. But by standards of the day, he was liberal, and he absolutely deplored slavery. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:01, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Yep. Booth was a white supremacist. In other words, his views on race were fairly typical for American whites of his era, northern or southern. In our era, we often equate white supremacy with hatred and violence, but in Lincoln's era it could be paternalistic and compassionate. Even many white abolitionists took it for granted that whites were inherently superior to blacks. —Kevin Myers 13:03, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

You have to be careful using modern terms and concepts for historical events and people. Booth was probably fairly typical for his milieu. See Moral relativism. ---— Gadget850 (Ed) ^talk 13:09, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

"White supremacy" may be a modern term but it's an old concept. In scholarly writings it is routine to discuss "white supremacy" in 19th century America; I'd go so far as to say that you cannot understand Lincoln's era without understanding white supremacy. A typical citation, this one from Don E. Fehrenbacher, writing in the 1970s: "Lincoln in the 1850s did plainly endorse the existing system of white supremacy, except for slavery." Scholars debate the degree to which Lincoln was a white supremacist; with Booth, there's little room for doubt. He was a white supremacist, i.e. his views were fairly typical. —Kevin Myers 14:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Fairly typical for a pro-slavery person. Let's not forget that there was a huge anti-slavery movement and sentiment, even though even many of its members may be seen as partly racist by today's standards. It certainly can't be claimed that the average American of the time was pro-slavery as Booth was.--91.148.159.4 (talk) 16:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

---

In the political context of the 1840s and the 1850s in the US, giving blacks equal voting rights and full "social equality" was a controversial "advanced" position supported by only a distinct minority of the electorate in most areas (while usually a much larger section of the electorate, even in many areas in the north, would have been vehemently opposed to it). At that time, even many of those who were strongly opposed to slavery on moral and humanitarian grounds, and were thoroughly disgusted by Dred Scott, "bleeding Kansas" etc. were often somewhat uncertain or hesitant about giving full equal rights -- or at least argued for handling one issue at a time (i.e. fighting slavery first), without unnecessarily anticipating eventual future issues which would be controversial and divisive within the Free Soil party or the Republican party at the moment. Lincoln was among the uncertain and hesitant (especially before the war), but he made few explicitly racist statements, except during the Lincoln-Douglas debates (where he uttered what he thought was the necessary minimum of racism to stay a viable candidate in the 1858 Illinois Senate race, in response to the very racist Stephen A. Douglas's accusations of "Black Republicanism"), and it would be grotesque to try to lump together Lincoln with someone like David Duke. AnonMoos (talk) 18:06, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

But why is Lincoln hailed as some saintly hero when he wasn't crusading for equal rights, he was just against slavery? Would he agree with MLK's ideas for equality for all people regardless of color, gender or creed? Abolishing slavery was a pretty big step in the right direction, but it would be another 100 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed, when equality for all became the law of the land.24.189.90.68 (talk) 02:30, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually, there was a high degree of equality, in the South, enforced by federal troops, during Reconstruction. StuRat (talk) 05:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Lincoln was a complex character, and is not easily pinned down. In a way, being assassinated was a good career move. He had more enemies than you can count, and one of them got him; but his death (as with that of JFK) allowed his successors to invoke his memory to push reform legislation through Congress. Lincoln's focus more than anything else was not so much about slavery but about preserving the Union - he had the vision and foresight to realize that fracturing the USA would weaken it in the long run. His Emancipation Proclamation, while it did nothing about the slaves at that moment, was a brilliant political stroke, as it made the war "about" slavery and held at bay countries like England which might have come to the south's aid otherwise. Maybe it would be better to say that Lincoln was a white "superiorist". That was by no means an uncommon view. T.R. used to refer to "our little brown brothers", and he was a liberal for his day. Race relations are complicated throughout our history. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:13, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

User 24.189.90.68 asked, "But why is Lincoln hailed as some saintly hero when he wasn't crusading for equal rights, he was just against slavery?"

The reason is: Because being against slavery was heroic enough. Lincoln wasn't an abolitionist, but he was the first person elected president who had repeatedly and publicly characterized slavery as morally wrong. He wasn't crusading for racial equality, but he was a consistent advocate for the principle that blacks were entitled to the natural rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. By our standards that may be a mild position to take, but slaveowners found it so alarming that some slave states seceded even before Lincoln took office. Abolitionists were initially unenthusiastic about Lincoln because he wasn't one of them, but they eventually realized that he was going to advance their agenda more than they could have hoped. There's a lesson there about pragmatic adherence to principles. —Kevin Myers 06:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Lincoln was the first person elected president who had repeatedly and publicly characterized slavery as morally wrong - no, that's not true. Thomas Jefferson did so as well. Of course, as a slave-owner himself he was inconsistent about this, and later in life he did not stress this opinion very much. But the sentiment was doubtlessly there. "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism[...]" and "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever..." --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:21, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

As usual with history, the details matter, not just the pull quotes. My words "repeatedly and publicly" were carefully chosen. Like other slaveowners of the founding generation (e.g. Washington and Madison), Jefferson sometimes criticized slavery in writings that were not intended for the general public. The quote you give is from Notes on the State of Virginia, which was prepared for private circulation in France. Jefferson specifically warned against publicizing his "strictures against slavery" (Shuffleton edition introduction, p. xvi). He was alarmed when it became clear that his sentiments about slavery were going to be published in America; he initially hoped that his authorship would remain anonymous, or, failing that, that the book would be read by a select audience. As David Brion Davis said of this situation, Jefferson "would not take the risk of placing his own prestige squarely behind his antislavery views" (The problem of slavery, p. 178). As president and retired president, Jefferson was even more reluctant to criticize slavery publicly. According to Davis, "the most remarkable thing about Jefferson's stand on slavery was his immense silence" (ibid, 179). Perhaps Jefferson's silence on slavery was politically prudent for his time, but the fact remains that Jefferson, unlike Lincoln, was unwilling to repeatedly and publicly characterize slavery as morally wrong. —Kevin Myers 19:39, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I never said that Lincoln was some "saintly hero", but during the the last five years of his life he was the face of white moderate progressivism towards blacks in the United States, and the most prominent black political personality of the time (Frederick Douglass) supported his presidential candidacy in both 1860 and 1864, so it would be rather absurd to call him simply and only a "white supremacist". If you demand that people in 1860 be fully and completely anti-racist according to modern standards, then you would find that only a few theoretical "advanced" thinkers (without much practical political influence) would meet your standards of untainted purity. In this context, it's kind of useless to beat up on Lincoln for not being an immediatist abolitionist or uncompromising racial equality advocate, because no immediatist abolitionist or uncompromising racial equality advocate could realistically have been elected president of the United States in 1860, so whoever filled that office (if not Lincoln) would have fallen equally short by modern standards (probably even more so). Lincoln was no immediatist abolitionist, but by the standards of his time and place he was a moderate progressive, and he was issuing qualified public anti-slavery statements as early as 1837 -- when there was no possible political advantage for Lincoln (in his role as a state legislator from central Illinois) in being seen as any kind of anti-slavery advocate (and a lot of potential political liabilities -- see Elijah Parish Lovejoy). AnonMoos (talk) 08:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

WTO, World Bank and IMF

What is the eligibility to become a member of the board of the directors of 1. World Trade Organization, 2. World Bank and 3. IMF. --WTLop (talk) 08:17, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

These are international organizations made up of member states. Their dgovernance differs from that of private sector organizations. In the WTO, each of the members is in theory equal. The decisional organ is the Conference of Ministers; there is no inner council (e.g. nothing like the United Nations Security Council) as far as I can tell from the article. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund both have a Board of Governors, whose composition is proportional to the contribution of the various members to the institutions' capital. The governors are nominated by the member states who hold seats on the board (often, more than one country will poll their votes together in order to have enough weight to be able to appoint a governor). So, to answer the O.P.'s question directly, in order to be a member of the equivalent of the board of directors of the WTO, one needs to be the Minister of Trade of one of the member countries. For the other two organizations, one must be appointed by a government which holds a seat on the council of governors. Typically, the governors include former Central Bank presidents (for the IMF), senior aid officials (for the WB) and other former top-level bureaucrats. These are not jobs the man on the street can apply for. --Xuxl (talk) 17:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The Catholic church's influence on pedophilia statistics

I've often heard it said that the abused become abusers. If that is true, then it seems to follow that the pedophile priests that have been in the news of late have been creating abusers. And again, if the first bit is true, has anyone looked into how much the pedophilia problems that we have today have been started by bad priests? Basically, how much are they responsible for? Either world wide or for a single country will do. I'm not really sure how anyone could quantify this or if it has even been looked at but it came to mind yesterday while hearing more about the scandals. Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 09:55, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There seems to be a flaw in the logic that "the abused becomes the abuser". If this was 100% true, and each abuser abuses several others, then the pattern of abuse would encompass 100% of society in just a few generations. However, AFAIK, the percentage of abuse isn't going up, although the reporting of such cases is. StuRat (talk) 10:18, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There's nothing new under the sun. If the abused become the abusers, then there's a good chance the abusers were once abused themselves. That's not to condone anything for a second; but there's still a bigger picture here, which does not have its beginning with modern-day bad priests. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 11:58, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Masturbation

We men are quite good at it. When deprived of sex men always do it. It is rightly said that 95 % men masturbate and 5 % lie ! What about women ? Do they do it as frequently or if at all ? And how do they do it ? Do they also ejuaculate ?(if yeah what ?) Jon Ascton  (talk) 11:07, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Did you not read the article you linked to? --TammyMoet (talk) 11:50, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Once the men are "done", even the ones who are "quite good at it", the women are just getting started. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:59, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I read that just under two thirds (60%) or women masturbate. One third (33%) of all porn viewers are women according to the same source. The source was a sort of educational poster about pornography, which I doubt you would find online.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 19:03, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

For the OP's last question, see Female ejaculation. Ghmyrtle (talk) 19:22, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

K.L. Lebenau, 1945

Among a dozen drawings by Abraham Ryza (Lodz, 1920–Los Angeles, 2001) that depict the abuse of concentration camp inmates by SS staff, half are signed (lower right corner) with the initials "A.R.", the year "1945", and the name LEBENAU in block letters. Could this have been the name of a camp, or possibly a misspelling of Liebenau? The I.T.S. lists two camps with the latter name and none with the former - which I'm trying to pin down before checking alternate or variant spellings. -- Deborahjay (talk) 11:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There does seem to have been an internment camp in Laufen-Lebenau, Bavaria. Holocaust testimonies: European survivors and American liberators in New Jersey I don't know whether it is the same facility as the modern day JVA Laufen-Lebenau. Its history dates back to 1862. ---Sluzzelin talk 12:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This [11] source says: "Nach den Aufzeichnungen des Laufener Stiftsdekan und Stadtpfarrer Peter Gries (1894-1977) kam vier Tage vor dem Einmarsch der Amerikaner, das war der 1. Mai, ein "Trieb" von etwa 230 KZ-Häftlingen, alle in erbärmlichem Zustand, aus verschiedenen Lagern in die Strafanstalt Lebenau.", meaning that shortly before the end of WW II some 230 KZ inmates were transferred to Lebenau, a prison in Bavaria close to the border to Austria. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:33, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Attica in the Threepenny Novel

In Fewkoombey's dream in Brecht's Threepenny Novel, why does the judge ask about Attica?--188.222.58.219 (talk) 12:12, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Has there ever been an atheist Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court?

20.137.18.50 (talk) 12:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Almost certainly. The question is if there ever was an atheist who was open about this on the U.S. Supreme Court. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:40, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, openly. That's what I meant, thanks. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 13:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

To elaborate, since most US voters are not atheists, people running for office might want to hide their atheism, lest it hurt their chances of winning elections. A Supreme Court Justice isn't elected, but is selected by people who are (the President and Senate), so might also want to pretend to be religious, to curry their favor. StuRat (talk) 13:50, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

According to our article, Felix Frankfurter was a non-practicing Jew, and regarded religion as "an accident of birth". --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I would venture much farther than StuRat's timid "might". All American politicians claim to be people of faith. Unfortunately, it seems that for many American voters, being religious is a requirement for receiving a vote. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

"All" is a pretty strong statement. I direct you to List of nontheists (politics and law) which lists a few elected Americans in the mix. In 2007, representative Pete Stark declared that he didn't believe in a higher power. He's the only openly atheist member of the U.S. congress. Buddy431 (talk) 19:39, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I didn't know about Stark, good find — but he is quoted in that MSNBC article as claiming he is a Unitarian, and it appears that the reporter interpreted this as referring to Unitarian Universalism, which our own article declares to be a religion (hence he still purports to be a "person of faith", in something). Comet Tuttle (talk) 20:20, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

That reminds me of the Tom Skerritt character in the movie Contact. He wanted the committee's votes to be the one in the spaceship pod thing. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 18:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This page claims David Davis was "not a member of any church." -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:08, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Interesting. Davis was kind of Lincoln's "kingmaker", and Lincoln returned the favor by nominating him to the Supreme Court. Lincoln was ostensibly Christian, but was also thought to be agnostic or even atheistic, and was likewise not a churchgoer. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

On Killing (philosophy)

Why is it wrong to kill somebody? But please leave Religion and Law aside, because I want to get an answer that even an atheistic outlaw might understand. --95.88.26.239 (talk) 14:07, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, there's the fear of reprisal. That isn't a moral argument so much as a safety one, though. As for moral arguments, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" seems to apply whether you believe in god(s) or not. StuRat (talk) 14:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Or, put more succinctly and less problematically, don't do unto others what you wouldn't want them doing to you. (Which gets around the fact that just because something floats your boat, it might not others.) --Mr.98 (talk) 15:00, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

(ec)You're asking why it's "wrong" to kill, yet you want to leave religion and law out of it. But "wrong" itself is a moral/religious/legal concept. If you want a practical answer, I would say it's because it's disruptive to society, which is why there have always been laws against it. As far as the moral aspect, let's reverse it and see what you think: What would be wrong with someone killing you? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Digression
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
} Biologically, if you are weak enough that your fellow humans are able to kill you, then it's good if you get killed before you pass your 'weak' genes down to the next generation :) 20.137.18.50 (talk) 14:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC) So all babies should be killed? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC) That logic doesn't really apply to a social species, like us. In order to act collectively, we can't spend all our resources trying to kill each other (and protecting ourselves from being killed). Imagine if all the ants in a colony were always at each other's throats. StuRat (talk) 14:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Lions have some degree of social order (of course nowhere near that of humans) and yet some male lions eat their own children. I'm not being mean-spirited, just hypothesizing. 20.137.18.50 (talk) 15:13, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Don't feed the trolls... --Mr.98 (talk) 14:59, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Agreed. Throwing food under the bridge is disruptive. 10draftsdeep (talk) 15:17, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Who's a troll ? If you mean Bugs saying "So all babies should be killed?", that sounds like a legit reductio ad absurdum argument against "killing the weak to improve the species". If he's being a troll, then so was Jonathon Swift, with A Modest Proposal. StuRat (talk) 15:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC) I took it to mean Mr. 98 was saying I was feeding Mr. 20, but he would have to clarify that point in order to be certain. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC) And his placement and tabbing would indicate he was responding to me, so I'm thoroughly confused. StuRat (talk) 17:30, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Aha, so we're both thoroughly confused. Maybe that was his objective. :) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:22, 13 April 2010 (UTC) The 20.137 comment I was calling trollish (it is an expression of Social Darwinism so idiotic that even Hitler wouldn't have agreed with it), and I was implying that both of you were feeding it.  ;-) --Mr.98 (talk) 23:30, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Roger. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Let's first make it clear that not everybody thinks it is unequivocally bad to kill people all the time. Even the Bible is usually considered to say it is bad to murder someone, which by definition a non-sanctioned killing. There is plenty of killing in there and allowed by our laws—states can kill, for example, in war, or often via capital punishment. Murder makes a lot of sense to outlaw for a society, because human beings take a lot of resources to develop and arbitrarily offing them leads to extremely unstable social situations. This is likely the main reason that societies disallow arbitrary murder, and the main reason that religions disallow it as well, whether or not they say this up front or not. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:59, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, the Ten Commandments item is taken to mean "murder" specifically, and in a bit of circular reasoning, "murder" is "the unlawful taking of human life." When people call abortion, capital punishment or warfare "murder", they are technically incorrect. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:11, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Also, there's the "greater sin" aspect. If someone is threatening your family's life, and you shoot him to death, you may have sinned by shooting him, but the greater sin would be to let him kill your family. That, extrapolated to the national level, is a justification for war. I once heard William Buckley say, "There is no such thing as a 'moral' war, but there is such a thing as a 'defensible' war." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I'll reference the social contract, a theory often used to describe the role of government. Thomas Hobbes famously said that without government, human lives would be "nasty, brutish, and short". Because we ourselves don't want to be killed by others, we give up our right to kill on our own. I know you didn't want laws, but there's a lot of philosophy about government. The accuracy of the social contract in describing actual governments is disputed, but it's an interesting idea. Buddy432 (talk) 15:08, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Laws, or the "social contract", are as old as society itself. Putting religion and law aside is called "anarchy". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:11, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

In case I wasn't clear, I meant that the OP didn't want laws used as a justification for not killing people, not that he wanted anarchy. Buddy432 (talk) 15:16, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict with below)And strictly speaking, laws aren't as old as society itself. In many societies, the will of the king/chief/religious leader was enforced pretty haphazardly, without codified laws. The Code of Hammurabi went a long way towards the modern practice of actually having a "rule of law", instead of a "rule of whatever the person in charge feels like". That's one of the criticisms of the social contract: governments didn't really form by people getting together and saying they wanted a government. They formed because people with the most power subjugated everyone else. Buddy432 (talk) 15:20, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

<sign...> philosophical myopia. Look, in the animal world, animals will sometimes kill members of their own species. usually not - animals that fight to the death tend to die off early and fail to pass on their genes, so most animals back down before death - but it does happen. the reason it's acceptable in the animal world is that we're talking about the death of one animal, which is irrelevant to the species as a whole. With humans, though, there are the dual problems of mind and technology. if you kill someone, that will likely not be the end of it. their friends and relatives are likely to come hunting for you, and no matter how big and mean you are, you won't stand up to a wave of angry relatives, not unless you use technology (a sword, a gun, a bomb). so, now what do you do: kill off all the friends and relatives of the first person you killed, to prevent reprisals? kill off all the people of the same race/ethnicity of the person you killed, in case they decide you're going to hunt them, as well? kill off an entire nation, in case the nation decides to take reprisals for you killing one of their citizens? Humans have complex social bonds and emotional attachments, and it's a fair bet that if you kill one human you enrage a notable number of other humans, who will come looking for you, and the whole situation will escalate. You can be a serial killer or a terrorist, killing people at random to make it hard for others to find you, but the former general marks you as the lowest of the low and the latter invites broad reprisals against your own kith and kin, and the technology to hunt down and kill people keeps getting better and better all the time.

If you are a complete loner (no friends, family, or attachments) and the person you want to kill is a complete loner (no friends, family or attachments), and the two of you have a mutual desire to kill each other... then go find a nice corner out in the desert and have at it (because no one cares). otherwise you're not just killing a person, you're cutting into a large and complex social fabric, and the trouble from it won't end. --Ludwigs2 15:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

So he's asking why there is a law against it, yes? And I think that's pretty well covered. People freely killing each other could result in social breakdown and ultimately extinction. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:21, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

He is not asking why there is a law against it. The OP clearly excluded any legal explanation. Try to convince a atheist outlaw why he shall not murder. Quest09 (talk) 15:35, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Oh, OK. Well, I'll keep it simple then: He shouldn't kill because someone else is liable to kill him in return. Unless he's OK with that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:42, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Maybe put that a little more subtly: if one is killing for a reason or goal (anything from killing for money, power, or love to killing for the sheer fun of it) than one or more aspects of society are going to put a lot of effort -directly or indirectly - into making sure that that reason or goal is in vain. In the animal world, the logic "If I fight with, defeat, and maybe kill X, I will be rewarded with Y" works, because once X is gone nothing obvious stands between you and Y. in the human world the same logic fails, because removing X will generally dredge up a whole assortment of new participants dedicated to getting between you and Y (if only by mounting your head on a stick). Of course, putting it rationally like this is silliness, because most people learn (by the time they are 6 or so) that they depend on the society around them, and that society gives to people that play together nicely and withholds from people who don't. it's only in that 'adolescent rebellion' stage when people hold the erroneous conclusion that they have complete freedom of action (a necessary stage to break them out of family authority into existence in the greater wold, but not a stage that lasts in most). --Ludwigs2 16:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

And here's the basic problem: The OP didn't ask for practical reasons not to commit murder; he asked why it's wrong. That's not got to do with practicality, it's got to do with morality, which is a social concept. You may scoff at this, but here's a bit from Love and Death: Sonia (Diane Keaton) wants the two of them to assassinate Napoleon. Boris (Woody Allen), who has essentially claimed to be an atheist or at least an agnostic earlier in the film, objects on the grounds that "murder is immoral". Now, how do you convince an "outlaw atheist" that murder is immoral, i.e. is wrong? It does not compute! The best you can do is to try to appeal to his selfish interests. But does that make it "wrong" to him? No, just "not practical - fraught with consequences." That's different. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Besides the legal and religious aspect (that you don't care), there is the practical aspect (above) and also the psychological aspect. How would you feel after killing someone, even if you have a reason?--Quest09 (talk) 15:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Many would feel bad, some would feel nothing, some would feel good, depending on circumstances and disposition. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:32, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

As for killing causing the breakdown of social order, that's a good argument for why others shouldn't kill, but not so good of an argument for any individual, as a single killing isn't likely to cause the collapse of civilization (although they gave it a good shot with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand). StuRat (talk) 15:39, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Not so true as you might think. see Hatfield-McCoy feud, or other examples of clan or gang wars --Ludwigs2 16:31, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I'd argue from the point of view of valuing knowledge for its own sake. Killing somebody destroys knowledge (in the absence of extenuating circumstances, where the killing defends some other knowledge). If we accept that the creation of knowledge is our basic motivation, then that's a reason not only to avoid killing people but also to be cooperative and rational. I find I can get a lot of moral mileage out of this principle. Uh ... oh yes, this is a ref desk. I don't know if there's an appropriate article. Knowledge value, sort of, but it's not much of a read. 213.122.54.206 (talk) 16:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

ah, please... reducing people to their inherent knowledge is bordering on a religious/moral/mystical explanation. you might as well just go whole-hog and say that that killing another is tantamount to killing yourself, because you damage the inherent common experience we all share. I don't dislike that argument, mind you, but it is a religious argument, not a philosophical one. --Ludwigs2 16:44, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I have no idea what you're talking about. It's my philosophy, and I'm an atheist (and I don't see religion as in any way pro-knowledge, at least not in the modern world). There is a worthwhile clarification to make, though, about self-interest; I figure we have a duty to be more concerned about ourselves than about others, because we are more familiar with ourselves, and therefore better able to further the growth of knowledge by being biased towards our own interests than if we attempt to serve the interests of the whole world by proxy. 213.122.14.148 (talk) 10:24, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

• You guys are overlooking the most obvious answer: If it weren't 'wrong' to kill people, everyone would be doing it. Want to take bets on how long the human race would last? HalfShadow 16:50, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
  • Yes, extinction, as I said. Tribal man realized the need for some order for the sake of survival, hence laws not only about murder but about theft and random violence and adultery and such stuff as that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

So, you all seem to agree that killing is only wrong ( - I do not mean morally or legally wrong - ) out of "fear" of reprisals (family, friends, etc...). However, what if nobody cares about Mr. X? Am I (a monkey with a weapon) "practically" justified to kill Mr. X knowing that he's got no relatives or friends??? --95.88.26.239 (talk) 17:21, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

No, whether they have people who care about them doesn't figure into it, for me, but whether they do good or evil does. StuRat (talk) 17:35, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't kill people ... because my crawlspace smells bad enough already. :-) StuRat (talk) 17:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Are you a serial killer? why would you want to kill such a person? the (fairly pointed) mistake you're making is assuming that one needs a reason not to kill, but one doesn't need a reason to kill. If this Mr. X is completely outside society, there's nothing he would have that you would want that would require killing him. if he has something you want, then he's not completely outside society, therefore you premise is wrong. If you are presupposing someone who is inclined to kill without reason, then no reason we give will stop him from killing - that kind of person gave up any pretense of humanity, and needs to be put down like a rabid animal. --Ludwigs2 17:44, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Which is why we typically execute serial killers. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I think we typically just imprison them. StuRat (talk) 17:52, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

In America, at least, they're usually prime fodder for the death angel. It depends on the state, of course. Gacy (Illinois) and Bundy (Florida) were sent to their just rewards. Dahmer (Wisconsin) got life in prison, which turned out to be not very long, as a fellow inmate clocked him a good one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This question is impossible to answer unless we know what stops you jumping off a bridge every day. Why do you want to live? We can then tell you why it is wrong to kill. I could write reams on this subject bu am currently unwilling. Read Reciprocal altruism and Competitive altruism--92.251.147.169 (talk) 18:40, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I didn't agree with this, see my answer above (which unfortunately has had the word "mystical" appended to it in my absence, making it easy to dismiss and overlook). 213.122.14.148 (talk) 10:33, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Too put it simply: in most circumstances, both you and everyone else will be more harmed by you killing someone than by you not killing someone. There are exceptions to this, such as killing someone who is about to kill you and a load of other people.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 18:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

---

Kant's Categorical imperative might make interesting reading (though it's explained more abstractly than necessary in the Wikipedia article)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the whole basis of the question is flawed. We're asked to leave aside moral, religious and legal paradigms. Yet, they're the only paradigms where there is such a concept as "right and wrong". In purely practical or utilitarian contexts, something either works or it doesn't, and right/wrong doesn't enter into it. For a person in a great rage, killing someone might work as an outlet for their feelings, at least until they realise that what they've done is irrevocable. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:18, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

FWIW, the original question asked that only religion and law be left out, not morality. Of course, morality is very much intertwined with the other two, as many people have elaborated so far. Because of this, it is very difficult to pin down a set of morals for any particular atheist anarchist, as they probably vary significantly from person to person. —Akrabbim^talk 19:29, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Exactly. The word "wrong" implies divergence from what is "right", or some set of rules. You can't separate this from morality. We often hear people saying so-and-so is "morally wrong", as if there's a single Grand Set of Morals set in stone for all people at all times to adhere to. It does not work that way, and never has. Something may be terribly wrong in relation to a particular person's moral code, but quite ok for another person. Even leaving aside all the religious and legal issues, abortion would be a very good example of that. But is abortion a good example for this question, which is about killing "somebody"? It depends on your point of view. Some say abortion is the killing of a human being, and the whole panoply of rules about the killing of humans inherently applies to it. But some say it does not involve the loss of a human life, so those rules are irrelevant. Who decides who's "right" and who's "wrong" about this question? -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:56, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Don't let religion hijack morality please. I will say it again, in most circumstances, both you and everyone else will be more harmed by you killing someone than by you not killing someone. There are exceptions to this, such as killing someone who is about to kill you and a load of other people.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 19:39, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Why would an "atheist outlaw" care about "morality"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:48, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Like most people you seem to think morality is some set religious rules, a sad side effect of the hijacking of morality by religion. Contrary to popular expectations, two people deciding not to kill each other because they are useful to one another is morality in the same way someone deciding not to kill others because they believe killing is inherently evil is morality. Morality is simply your code of conduct: "I will not harm him because he is useful to me" is a code of conduct just like "Killing people is inherently evil". I have no religious beliefs, and although I have no evidence I suspect you don't either, yet both of us have moral codes.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 20:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Maybe Bugs is just pointing out the underlying absurdity in the OPs question, namely that "atheist outlaws" would presumably just kill people, because they are, well, "atheist outlaws", unless they were given a reason that is beyond law and religion. And that is a (perhaps not very) subtle case of hijacking morality in religion's name, if you ask me. TomorrowTime (talk) 20:50, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

"I will not harm him because he is useful to to me" is not morality, it's expedience. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:55, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

EO has a good section on what "moral" means:[12] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:00, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

What you have in quotation marks there is what every single reason for being "moral" boils down to.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 22:20, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

"Rights" and "wrongs" are tied to one another, or at least the basic and largely incontrovertible ones are. While everyone has a life, except colloquially-speaking, not everyone has the same property. When humans band together, as they always have, we being a social species, those with the most property want it protected. Thus systems are set up, with the greatest property-holders having the greatest influence. The "wrongness" of murder is tied to the wrongness of stealing. Stealing property can be facilitated by killing the owner. Thus when systems are set up to protect property rights, the prohibition on murder is a part of that system. The question could be asked why are there property rights. That question is not asked because our acquisitive and possessive qualities are a more innate aspect of who we are as creatures than our vaunted aversion to killing neighbors. And anyway it just sounds good to say we respect the lives of others. Bus stop (talk) 22:21, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

You're right that right and wrong are intertwined - one does not exist without the other. The dictionary definitions of "moral" equate it to "character". A person is not necessarily a good judge of his own character. I'm sure even Hitler thought he was a man of high character. Character is judged by the other members of the group, tribe, or whatever. And it's aided in that judgment by deciding on certain rules. You can try to exclude religion and law, but you can't exclude rules. The rules are society's agreement or "social contract" on what constitutes good behavior and bad behavior - a.k.a. "character". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Bear in mind that murder may not be a crime in a hermit society. Interestingly enough, even in such a small group, the perpetrator is executed. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:56, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

This thread is already quite bloated as it is without me adding fuel to the flame, but here goes: "What's wrong with killing?" is one of the central questions of the extremely controversial book Practical Ethics by Peter Singer. I would do the book a great disservice in attempting to condense its arguments in a few sentences here, but if you're looking for a somewhat recent, relatively jargon-free and quite thought-provoking line of reasoning "that even an atheistic outlaw might understand", I'd say that book is as good a start as any. Even if you – as many do – disagree with his conclusions. Gabbe (talk) 11:25, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Monomyth

I am looking for any literature that are good examples of the female version of the monomyth. --Reticuli88 (talk) 15:40, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

It's not exactly literature, but how about Xena, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Sailor Moon ? StuRat (talk) 15:54, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Reading the linked file puts me in mind of The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil by Fay Weldon. --TammyMoet (talk) 17:31, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

If anti-heroines are acceptable, maybe the Fisherman's wife... AnonMoos (talk) 18:18, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict)One of the criticisms of the monomyth is that it's primarily male-centered. The only female example that I recall Campbell using in HWTF is that of Daphne, who "refuses the call" by turning into a laurel tree so that Apollo wouldn't boink her. You might be interested in American Monomyth, which apparantly incorporates a female version more readily. These so-called "Heidi-redeemers" save their community through miricles and manipulation. Not sure of any examples. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 20:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand all the details of the monomyth, but does the story of Judith, from the biblical apocrypha, qualify? AlexTiefling (talk) 22:20, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

It seems like it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 01:44, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Traci Harding's Ancient Future trilogy follows the pattern, with a female protagonist, but I wouldn't have called it 'good', so much as Mary Sue fiction. Steewi (talk) 02:05, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

From history, people like Boudica and perhaps Cleopatra VII may have been remembered to the present because they correspond to your monomyth - in other words they were female heros. See also List of women warriors in folklore92.29.104.157 (talk) 10:39, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Medieval married names

When did women start taking their husband's name as their customary surname in the English upper classes? More specifically, did the wives of the Southworths of Samlesbury Hall take the name "de Southworth" as their own as early as the 13th century? —Akrabbim^talk 15:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

This article here might be able to answer your question: Family names. It notes that in medieval times if a man was of a lower social class than his wife, he would often assume his wife's surname; therefore it's safe to presume that it was during this same medieval period that women of all social classes took their husbands' surnames as their own providing he was not of an inferior class.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 09:02, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

White people in Africa

Are Zimbabwe and South Africa the only African nations that have significant white population? If not, then which other nations have white people in Africa? -- 16:30, 13 April 2010 76.64.52.208

There used to be significant populations of European origin in Algeria and Kenya... AnonMoos (talk) 16:52, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Angola and Mozambique as well. Many of the Indian Ocean islands considered part of Africa (Mauritius, Seychelles, la Réunion...) have significant European populations. --Xuxl (talk) 17:55, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I thought that the white people were expelled from Angola after independence.--Quest09 (talk) 19:10, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Probably not what you looked for, but people in northern Africa have fairly light skin; I'd call them "white" though not everyone would. The U.S. Census bureau agrees with me, though; they call Middle Easterners "white". This is perhaps the reason some people say "Africa" when they mean "sub-Saharan Africa". Jørgen (talk) 18:32, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Most northern Africans are certainly "Caucasian", though whether you consider that "white" or not is up to you. And WHAAOE: White Africans of European ancestry. Buddy431 (talk) 19:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Naturally, we have an article: White Africans of European ancestry. According to that, Namibia has the second largest white population, after South Africa. Warofdreams talk 21:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Copyright or restrictions on PDF-scans of old, now public domain, texts?

If I have understood things right, then old journal articles automatically become public domain 75 years after publication.

Now I wonder:
May a scanned (PDF) copy of a public domain text, somehow, still be restricted by some kind of "copyright"?
(Maybe because of the work spent on scanning and making the PDF-file? Or maybe because of the software used?).

In other words: Do I risk breaking some law or regulation, if I spread copies of a PDF file containing an 75 year old text, when I have no idea of who or where this particular file came from? or How about if I charge a fee for my effort?
--Seren-dipper (talk) 16:37, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

It depends on where you live. For Wikipedia purposes, see this link. In the US, it has been ruled by a court (see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.) that a photograph of a public domain work is also in the public domain. In Britain, however, the National Portrait Gallery has done everything it can to assert copyright over its photographs of old, public-domain paintings it possesses. See this BBC story. To answer your other questions, you can charge for your effort, sure; but you probably would not be able to prevent others (via copyright law) from copying and distributing your work freely once they receive a copy. The 75 year rule is not absolute; see public domain; it can get complicated (some old copyrights could get renewed in the US for a certain period). For your own liability reasons, if I were you, I would make sure I could prove the journal was in the public domain before I commenced this. Comet Tuttle (talk) 16:55, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

So is a 100 year or older text or image in Google Books fair game to add to a Wikipedia article? Edison (talk) 16:04, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Blue food

These photos set me to thinking of doing the same, but with the flags of Scotland and Norway. The trouble for both is the colour blue - I can't think of a blue or blueish foodstuff that is native to either country. The few blue foods I can think of don't match: blue corn, arròs negre, and blueberries are all foreign, and while I'm sure I could find a blue cheese from both countries, it doesn't really seem ideal. Brambles are really more purplish. Can anyone suggest a blue(ish) food that is (at least vagely) Scottish and ditto Norwegian? -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 18:15, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Wild bilberries collected in Norway.

I couldn't think of anything until you mentioned blueberries - apparently what we Norwegian call blueberries ("blåbær") is not the same as what is usually called blueberries in English - but Wikipedia has an article on Bilberry. I don't think these are grown for sale, though, so you'd have to wait until the fall and collect some yourself, though I'd think it perfectly acceptable to "cheat" and use blueberries instead (they are also marketed as "blåbær" in Norwegian supermarkets). Of course you have to take care not to crush them, as they are red on the inside. Except from that, I don't know. Some type of white fish might have a bluish tint but hard to integrate with other food. By the way, those pictures you linked to were really nice, good idea! Jørgen (talk) 18:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

[ec] Bilberries are native to both Scotland and Norway. Bluefish and Atlantic mackerel can be caught offshore and have bluish skins. Marco polo (talk) 18:31, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Also sv:Blodpudding maybe (more often seen in Sweden but I think you can argue for a connection to Norway). If you agree it is blue, that is. Or something else with blood in it, like nn:Blodpølse Jørgen (talk) 18:41, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Those olives used in the Greek flag on the WildAmmo site certainly don't look very blue. Deor (talk) 19:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Australia's doesn't even try to be blue! What food is the Australian dishflag, by the way? ---Sluzzelin talk 20:37, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I think it's meant to be an "iconic" Australian and New Zealand meat pie. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:46, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes. It could be almost any pastry, but the tomato sauce on the Union Jack (no relation) gives it away. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 21:35, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Also the meat that one can see through the star-shaped holes. :-) Deor (talk) 23:10, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

That's assuming you know it's a meat pie. The dark stuff could be fruit or all manner of other things. I still reckon the tomato sauce is the giveaway. -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 01:12, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Would it be cheating to dye a non-blue native food? Googlemeister (talk) 20:02, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Perhaps not if that food is normally dyed blue (like maraschino cherries are normally dyed bright red or green). StuRat (talk) 20:33, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

It's not like there's a committee that will fail my dishes for lack of authenticity, but I was hoping the ingredients to be apparent to the viewer without explanation. So if the dyeing were commonplace and traditional then that would seem fine - the squid ink used to dye arròs negre, or the saffron (?) to dye the rice in the Spanish flag would seem entirely in keeping. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 20:51, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Incidentally, what's the foodstuffs used for Korea on that site? I can't make out what the middle circle is made from, and the divination lines on the sides look like sushi rolls, but that can't be right... TomorrowTime (talk) 21:00, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Gimbap, soy sauce, and I think gochujang. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 21:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Ah, I can see why I would confuse gimbap for makizushi, they do look a lot alike. TomorrowTime (talk) 21:12, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

These things are really very evocative of the native culture, food being one of the main windows we have to cultures. They also make light of the national flag, which is refreshing. Bus stop (talk) 21:16, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Apparently there is such a thing as Scottish heritage blue potatoes: [13] Marco polo (talk) 00:47, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Nice job on the tree for Lebanon ! BTW, the tomatoes in the Italian flag are not native to Italy, they are from America. However, they have certainly become associated with Italy in recent centuries. Now let's see you form all the points on all 50 stars on the US flag (out of mayo, presumably) or take on the Arabic writing on the flag of Saudi Arabia. StuRat (talk) 04:52, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I should point out that I found these photos, I didn't take them. -- Finlay McWalter • Talk 19:43, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

If you take the photography in a slightly different spectrum of light, you can have all the blue you want. =) 88.90.16.251 (talk) 08:50, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Or have them flying toward the camera at a significant portion of the speed of light, so they exhibit a blue shift. :-) StuRat (talk) 19:48, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Popularity of the EU within the EU

Why is the EU not that loved in the UK than in other parts of Europe? At first, I fought because they are paying for it, however, Danemark and Holland are also paying and despise that, the index of acceptance is much higher.--Quest09 (talk) 19:14, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Germany pays more than every other country. I don't understand that objection anyway. Why are people from, say, Yorkshire, happy with their money going to the home counties or Northern Ireland, yet not happy with it going to Bulgaria or Lithuania? Personally I'm not happy with it going anywhere, but as I have to pay it I don't mind where it goes so long as it's put to good use.--92.251.147.169 (talk) 19:42, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Your question is not phrased entirely clearly, but if you're asking why the EU is not embraced that enthusiastically in the UK, it has something to do with the legacy of a whole convoluted history; originally the UK refused to unambiguously place Europe above its Commonwealth and Colonial interests, then when it tried to join in 1963 and 1966, it was vetoed both times by De Gaulle. When it finally joined, France had entrenched things so that French agriculture was favored above all others, and the UK had to negotiate the UK rebate with great difficulty in order to avoid paying exorbitantly extravagant sums to subsidize inefficient French farmers. From the point of view of many average people, the EU is a remotely distant bureaucracy which seems to be chiefly concerned with such things as straightening bananas and creating "metric martyrs"... AnonMoos (talk) 20:08, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Because EU-bashing sells newspapers. So the newspapers print it, which reinforces the idea that the EU is bad...which makes EU-bashing stories popular in newspapers...and so on. Vimescarrot (talk) 20:17, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

That's certainly at least partially true -- but perhaps EU-bashing wouldn't get the same traction if it weren't for certain underlying attitudes which create a predisposition to accept negative stories. AnonMoos (talk) 20:25, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

My take on it was that they were happy with their trading arrangements under the British Commonwealth, and only joined the EU for fear of otherwise being locked out of the vast European market. That, combined with having to subsidize poorer nations and eventually losing the Queen on their money, made them a bit cranky. StuRat (talk) 20:23, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Except that the UK hasn't adopted the Euro, so we still have the Queen on our money. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 16:08, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

IMHO, the UK joined the EU largely to weaken (and to destroy it if possible) it from the inside and very little else. Flamarande (talk) 20:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The EU definitely gets the blame for Black Wednesday. - Jarry1250 ^{[Humorous? Discuss.]} 09:38, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

IMHO, the British hatred towards the UE is based upon their own culture and history. Remember that they live in an archipelago (a cluster of islands) and tried and only tried once to establish their own large European empire (by conquering the kingdom of France during the 100 year war). Afterwards they realized that any great continental power was a potential threat (a great continental European empire could conquer them). Therefore the great powers (the Empire of Spain, France, Austrian Empire, German Empire, Russian Empire) were always regarded with a certain degree of suspicion and whoever was the most powerful among them was considered (officially or not) the enemy that had to be fought, defeated and weakened. Check the history of British military interventions: most of the time they support the weaker power against the stronger one. A lot of medium continental powers meant that none of them could threaten the UK. That's why many peace agreements made with the UK try to maintain a balance of power. So how this sold to the unwashed masses? With the ideal of "our British Liberty is threatened by continental tyranny". They were right during WWII and this POV survives among their collective psyche. Flamarande (talk) 20:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Good answers from AnonMoos, Vimescarrot and Flamarande. And, on top of all that, they talk about us Brits behind our backs in funny foreign languages that we can't be bothered to understand - unlike those friendly people and distant cousins in the US, Australia, South Africa, India and so forth who we can understand and trust (some of the time). Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:22, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Note to US readers... the preceding comment may contain some irony. Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:24, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

As an aside, not sure if that was a typo, but note although the people are called Danes, the country is called Denmark in English (Danmark in Danish). Also presuming you're referring to th moderne country, it's better called Netherlands since Holland may refer to only one part of it and so may be offensive to those in the parts that they don't consider to be Holland (similar perhaps to referring to England if you mean the UK). Nil Einne (talk) 21:38, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

But it's so much more fun to call them the Nether Regions. :-) StuRat (talk) 04:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Everyone seems to be addressing the question in terms of why the English (and it seems within the UK the Scottish and Welsh are more EU friendly) dislike the EU, as though this is the unusual position. It might be interesting to think about why other countries favour the EU? If they do, what do the surveys say? It was the French and Dutch who rejected the Constitution in referenda after all.

Obviously some countries gain financially, but what about Germany (war guilt?) or the Netherlands (drugs?). As an English Eurosceptic the main reasons I hear given for membership are free trade (which we've had for many years without needing a shared government), an imaginary future in which we are at war (or trade war) with both the US and China and a suggestion that belief in national sovereignty is a bit, you know, xenophobic. 92.14.216.25 (talk) 22:36, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the more likely scenario is that the EU and NAFTA will eventually join to become a trading block of the nations which have environmental laws, democracies, human rights, respect copyrights, don't manipulate their currencies, etc., against those that don't care about those things, like China. Perhaps Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and a few others might then join. The problem with the WTO is that it's too inclusive, and allows some members to get away with too much crap. I have no idea why China was ever allowed to join without first allowing their currency to float, for example. StuRat (talk) 04:30, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Of course, other's may wonder what's the point of a group containing the US, when they basicly just ignore most decision they don't like (using their force combined with a few peanuts to convince the small complainants to back down), which it should have been fairly obvious to anyone that they would do even before it happened [14] (SAFE Port Act#WTO dispute [15] (United States – Canada softwood lumber dispute) [16]. Of course the US isn't the only one I think most commentators expect the results of the Airbus-Boeing dispute to be largely ignored by the US and the EU. Nil Einne (talk) 01:48, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Well with the BRIC countries expected to over-take the rich western countries in the long-run perhaps politically it's foolish to exclude these countries (China in particular) from being in the club - they're already hugely important to the world eocnomy (haven't they had continually the highest annual growth in GDP for about 30 years? (ignoring silly tiny-nations)). Back to the original-question though...basically I find that people here (Uk) like to moan about the EU lots, but few people seriously understand the wider role of the EU and how it helps/hinders the UK and even less can make rational theories about the impact on the UK were it to leave the EU (which, with the exception of a few nationalist numpties, i've rarely heard be seriously proposed). 194.221.133.226 (talk) 09:32, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Also don't forget that the British have a unique history with a theoretically more liberal political tradition than that of the Continental countries. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:03, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

One needs to look at England's history. Twice within the last 200 years it was, apart from Russia, the only European nation to hold out against an overly-ambitious Continental dictator. Oh, here in Italy, the EU is thoroughly despised due to the doubling of prices following the adoption of the Euro.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 13:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Switzerland is small, but still a European nation... Googlemeister (talk) 18:15, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

As a result of the bitter conflicts in the past, I just don't think the English trust the German-French power axis that dominates the EU.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 18:41, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

William Warham, by Hans Holbein the Younger drawing

I have a William Warham, Archbishop of Canterbury, drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger. And a hand written letter on the back of the frame telling about him. Can any one tell me how many of these drawing's exist.

If the picture to which you refer is this one, then the original appears to be in Elisabeth II's Royal Collection. As to how many copies exist, I suspect, counting those to be found in art books, the numbers are in the many thousands. Is the accompanying "handwritten letter" signed, and if so, by whom? Is the letter an original or a copy? Bielle (talk) 22:19, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Tablets of stone

Were there really tablets of stone brought down by Moses? And, assuming he (not God) wrote on them, how did he do it? Have any bits of the tablets ever been found?--BandUser (talk) 21:26, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The Tablets of Stone were, according to the bible, stored in the Ark of the Covenant, which disappeared when the Babylonians destroyed the temple. Neither the arc, nor its purported contents, have been found and generally accepted as the real deal, to my knowledge. Buddy431 (talk) 21:45, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

There may well have been Tablets of Stone in an Ark, which is mentioned in Biblical texts that also refer to confirmed historical events. I think that nonreligious scholars accept that there is a fair possibility that there was an Ark in Solomon's Temple that contained inscribed stone tablets. However, these tablets are not known to have been seen in the last 2,500 years. If they existed, we know nothing about their origins. Most nonreligious scholars see Moses as a legendary figure whose story may or may not have been based, loosely, on that of an actual person. There is no source other than the Bible that confirms the existence of Moses, and most nonreligious scholars agree that the story of the Exodus is largely if not completely fictional. Marco polo (talk) 00:31, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

And, according to the Bible, was Moses up the mountain long enough for God to inscribe the tablet (say, 5 minutes) or long enough for Moses to do it himslef and claim that God did it ? StuRat (talk) 04:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Forty days and nights (Exodus 24:18), long enough for the impatient Israelites to build a Golden Calf. Buddy431 (talk) 05:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

According to Jewish sources the tablets were made of [blue] sapphire (not rock), and were not objects that could exist by normal physical rules. Specifically the center of letters (for example an "o") stayed in their proper place, but were unsupported by anything. And the tablets could be read correctly (not mirror image) both from the front and the back, yet the empty space of the letters went all the way through the tablets. Also they were square, not rectangles as is commonly depicted. The second set was made by Moses (not God) and he was allowed to keep what was left after making them. And that was his source of wealth (since he, unlike everyone else did not take anything from Egypt since he was busy retrieving Josephs body). Source Ariel. (talk) 09:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

To answer both the OP and StuRat, Moses made the second ones. Ariel. (talk) 09:45, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, and they managed to misplace them. At some point, God must have wondered why He had selected such schlemiels as His "chosen people". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:09, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Vote counting

Has there ever been a system where the counting of votes was speeded up by having multiple boxes (one per candidate/party) and then weighing the ballot boxes to find the winner? --Rixxin (talk) 21:50, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Since voting is a secret, it's unlikely they would have such a system, especially as you're allowed to split a ticket among 2 or more parties. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:53, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

They could easily have all the boxes behind a screen to avoid giving away the secret. And as for voting for more than one party, that depends on the system. In the upcoming UK general election there will be only one vote per paper, for instance. 92.14.216.25 (talk) 22:27, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

OK, so you would be in a voting booth, and you would drop a ballot into one of two slots, let's say? When voting is over, you would weigh them. Keep in mind that before voting, you also have to weigh them empty, because what you want to measure is the weight of just the ballots, not the boxes too. Then what do you do if you messed up and put it in the wrong slot? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:32, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

(EC) Sigh. Rixxin's queried system has no secrecy implications one way or another, so long as voters are able to insert their vote without being viewed. Neither is the ticket observation conclusively dismissive since in many elections there is one thing being elected and you have a single vote. I take it Bugs is presupposing that whatever voting system he's used is universally applied. I have not heard of Rixxin's system being employed - at least not for the election of members of government - and hazard a guess that there are a number of practical objections: 1) the weight of a single vote is probably much less than the expected variability of weight of voting boxes ... bottom line, it is not a system that'll work well at distinguishing candidates getting similar amounts of votes, and in any event requires a standard of weighing and box manufacture unlikely to be practical 2) the number of boxes required is in proportion to the number of candidates standing, which means elections with large numbers of candidates require large numbers of boxes (remembering that there may be many polling stations. 3) The system invites fraud to the extent that a person can drop more weight into a voting box - sand, coins, &c. To the extent that bug's comment was of any use whatsoever, it reminds us that there is a problem of enabling the voter to vote in secrecy whilst enabling the election scrutineers to police the box. Clearly it is difficult to facilitate both of these. All that said, my local supermarket has a system whereby shoppers are given a green plastic coin and invited to insert it into one of three containers, each associated with a charity. Some amount of money is given by the supermarket each month in proportion with the rough volume of coins in each container. It's not weighing, nor is it for the election of government members, but it is a quick & easy voting system along Rixxin's lines. --Tagishsimon (talk) 22:34, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

The usual snippiness from Simon, as well as a lengthy essay (speaking of "worthless"). So I'll just summarize with what I had thought about saying previously but had decided to elaborate a little bit: "Such a system would be rife with fraud and would otherwise be impractical." Any questions, class? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:43, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

I apologize to the other readers here, for momentarily allowing myself to descend to Simon's level. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:49, 13 April 2010 (UTC) Oops, did it again. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:15, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

US elections typically have more than one -- sometimes dozens -- of races on the same ballot, so you'd have to have a lot of boxes. And speed really isn't an issue -- a stack of punch-card or optical-scan ballots can be counted in seconds, and electronic ballots in milliseconds. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 23:00, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

It's an interesting theoretical question. What he's describing is how, for example, grain is weighed - difference between full weight and empty weight of the truck is what the grain weighs. But for voting, it's clearly neither practical nor necessary. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:15, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

And it's necessary to have a precise count of votes, but not of oats. PhGustaf (talk) 23:57, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

Usually it's not necessary to have a precise count of votes, unless the poll is close, or a candidate is close to some arbitrary mark regarding future funding or something similar. Warofdreams talk 00:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

If everyone was voting at a single location, the weight system might be useful in cases where the vote was not close, as a way of getting a very quick result -- the heavier box wins. But in order to combine votes from multiple polling stations, you would either have to get accurate weights for every polling station, or you'd have to bring all the ballot boxes together to a central location (without mixing up which ones were which) and weigh them in large groups. Not very practical. And anyway, manual counting gets results quickly enough. --Anonymous, 06:15 UTC, April 14, 2010.

The proposed system has some similarities with the blackballing system. Provided the ballots were sufficiently distinctive and difficult to forge, it might not suffer greatly from fraud. While modern methods of vote counting are clearly superior, this would make some sense for an election more than, say, one hundred years ago, with a sufficiently large electorate. But, according to voting machine#Early History, even the first known proposal for some device along these lines envisaged use of a clockwork counter, rather than weighing the ballots. Warofdreams talk 00:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

According to Benjamin Graham, you're describing the long-term appreciation of a publicly traded company's price per share! He said (paraphrased), "In the short run, the stock market is a voting machine; in the long run, it's a weighing machine." 63.17.77.76 (talk) 04:07, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if it helps the OP but there have apparently been occasions in UK Parliamentary elections when scales were brought in as a secondary check on an election result. Upminster in 1979 was one such example. However, in those cases the ballot papers would have had to be separated by party already. Sam Blacketer (talk) 23:48, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

As TS mentioned, hiding the ballot boxes (as needed if you want to maintain secrecy) is a good way to encourage fraud even without using weight. When you start using weight meaning people don't even need legitimate looking ballot papers you've got a recipe for disaster. Ballot stuffing is already a problem in some countries. BTW in discussions of historic contexts like 100 years ago, it's perhaps worth remembering that there were very few if any very large electorates and given the transportaton and communication barriers of the time and absence of TVs or even widespread radios, the benefit of having the results in say 10 minutes instead of the say 5 hours normal counting may take is questionable. Remember when it comes to electorate sizes, many places wouldn't have allowed women voters at the time, and also perhaps some other people. In fact it's not even the size of the electorate that matters, presuming you count in the polling centre (and if you don't the advantage of a weight system is even more unclear), it's the size of the polling centre that matters more then the size of the electorate. Given the low density of the time and the transportation issues, polling centres would generally cover a lot less people then then they do now. Nil Einne (talk) 01:52, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

People have always been keen to find information as quickly as possible, and as I say, design of the ballots - for example, using a distinctive token - could limit the frequency of fraud. Weighing the ballot boxes wouldn't rule out a cursory check that everything in the boxes resembled one of these tokens or, if the election was close, conducting a detailed check. Other technical issues are not hugely problematic - for instance, each candidate's box could be a different, standardised, colour, which would make it easy to transfer them to a central counting place without confusion. On the specific point of electorates 100 years ago, I suppose it depends what you call large, but in the UK, there had certainly been city seats where 60,000 or more votes were cast, and these would have had only a very limited number of polling stations. Warofdreams talk 09:27, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Queen Elizabeth (Bowes-Lyon) visited France in 1938

King George VI and queen Elizabeth went to France July 19 to 22, 1938. We have a clue they visited the city of Vannes (Morbihan) but are unable to confirm. Dhatier (talk) 22:08, 13 April 2010 (UTC)

According to a contemporary newspaper, the royal couple went from Boulogne directly to Paris, stayed in the capital for three nights, then returned via Calais, stopping at the Australian war memorial in Villers-Bretonneux on the way. There is no indication they went way out to Brittany. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 01:27, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

That was quite the news day! Nazi Germany preparing for war, ominous mentions of Czechoslovakia, and Wrong Way Corrigan to boot. --Anonymous, 06:20 UTC, April 14, 2010.

Thank you. Dhatier (talk) 16:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

April 14

Why are Irish folk songs so sad

First of all, I hope that I don't offend people from Ireland. I'm from the Philippines so I'm not that keen about European history and culture. Anyways, I'm listening to Celtic Woman. I found that some of their songs are sad such as Siúil A Rúin, She Moved Through the Fair, Danny Boy and Carrickfergus (song). They are mostly about longing for their love and even death. Why is so?--121.54.2.188 (talk) 01:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

See History of Ireland. Part of it is the Irish character due to thousands of years of shitty living, brought to you by various English and British kings, Oliver Cromwell, and the Potato Famine. For most of its history, Ireland was not always the nicest place to live. --Jayron32 02:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Is it really most of its history? It was beyond the Roman Empire, and it was one of the major centres of Christian culture in the early middle ages. Maybe it all started going downhill when the Vikings invaded about 1000 years ago (and 1000 years is a long time to create a musical culture of depressing songs, of course). Adam Bishop (talk) 04:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, there is the music for an Irish jig. Those will only make you cry if you stand too close to the dancers and get kicked in the crotch. StuRat (talk) 04:42, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

To come in from a different angle, Ireland doesn't have a monopoly on sad folk song's, most of the Flamenco songs of Spain are intensely sad based around lost love and unrequited love. Richard Avery (talk) 08:03, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Lousy weather, living in Ireland ;)

HTH, HAND etc

ALR (talk) 08:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Infact a huuuuuge proportion of folk-songs (infact music in general) are about emotionally charged things, which often means sadness and horror. 194.221.133.226 (talk) 09:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know if the sadness derives from the dreary weather. I always cry when I hear Irish songs such as Danny Boy, Dublin in the Rare Ould Times, and Carrickfergus; then again many Neapolitan songs are sad and that city is definitely sunny. In fact O Sole Mio was written by a homesick man from Naples.--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:11, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

There are more modern songs than these that are sad, for example Christmas 1915.--92.251.220.72 (talk) 17:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't think the delivery of songs of the sort referred to are sad, though I have to admit only a smattering familiarity with this subject. But I happen to find the articulation of the English language by the Irish to be uplifting. It is very different from American English in this regard, at least in my perception. The words spoken might be sad, but the delivery I find ennobling and therefore uplifting. Bus stop (talk) 18:18, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

This is just selection bias. The Irish have a whole range of traditional music, of all types, it's just that the more plaintive songs were en vogue for a while (late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) and got exported to Britain and the US. Spend some time in an Irish pub (even one in the US, that attracts real Irish people) that has live music; you'll hear maybe one or two sad ballads and a ton of stuff you can hop to. --Ludwigs2 18:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Except in certain old men's pubs essentially none of the music will be identifiable as Irish.--92.251.220.72 (talk) 18:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Global business network

Is there any international non-governmental business network (global chamber of commerce) representing big businesses other than International Chamber of Commerce (ICC)? Are the political positions of ICC similar to the positions of the United States Chamber of Commerce? --WTLop (talk) 02:37, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In some places, there is the Better Business Bureau, which certifies that its members follow certain standards of business ethics. Consumers can identify its members by listings in BBB directories and by signs which they are authorized to display. An improved corporate image is an incentive for a business to follow those standards, although some people have additional motivations. (http://www.mlbible.com/proverbs/11-1.htm; http://www.mlbible.com/proverbs/20-10.htm) -- Wavelength (talk) 14:22, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Can't remember what book this is...

I remember reading a book a long time ago (or maybe just hearing the summary) that I can't remember either the title or the author of. As I recall, the main character was a young woman. She fell off a ladder (or some other height) and was caught by a man who conveniently happened by (he might have startled her?), only for her father to come out and find her in his arms. Her father, being ridiculously strict about rules of propriety, forced the two of them to get married, and the book is about the aftermath. I believe it was "Christian historical romantic fiction" or something, but I can't remember the book's title or anything about it other than this (probably slightly screwed-up) summary.

If anyone knows what book this is (or is better at Googling it than I am!), your help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! 24.247.163.175 (talk) 03:54, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Series vs. Trilogy (et al.)?

Many of my favorite authors have written several connected books about the same characters, and I like to get them and read them in order. I've been working on a database of all the books I own, and I include a special note for those books which a part of a sequence, indicating to which sequence they belong as well as their ordinal position within it. This has started me thinking . . . at what point does a sequence of books become a "series"? When you run of number-words (duology, trilogy, tetralogy, etc.)? Or are such words as "trilogy" and "tetralogy" reserved for works that necessarily form a story in their own right, whether or not the individual parts are readable standing alone? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.104.119.240 (talk) 05:50, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Personally (and this isn't official at all, just my personal opinion), I consider anything larger than two books (a prequel/sequel) to be a "series". In my opinion, a trilogy is just a special kind of series that only has three books. This isn't very helpful to someone trying to catalogue books by the type of series... but I'd say to just give up and call it a "series" when you can't think of more words. You could also look at what the author calls it--if they call it "chronicles" or "series" themselves, it would probably be best to organize it under that title. 24.247.163.175 (talk) 11:00, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Very sensible. I suppose I could also follow my own example in the above paragraph and refer to any continued storyline as a "sequence." This would mean I wouldn't have to change how books were listed in my classification system just because an author released another book (turning a trilogy into a tetralogy, say) and I wouldn't have to worry whether the works could stand alone or could be understood only as part of a whole. It works for prequel/sequel books as well as extended series, too. 71.104.119.240 (talk) 08:17, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Roman corn

In a handout my mother gives her students when she teaches them about ancient Rome, there is mention of the Romans eating cakes made of corn. They couldn't possibly have eaten what we know as corn today, since corn is indigenous to the Western hemisphere. I've been told that the word "corn" was used by pre-Colombian Europeans to refer to some other kind of food, and that what we now know as corn was first dubbed "Indian corn" by European settlers in the Americas. If this is so, what was it that the Romans make their cakes from? 71.104.119.240 (talk) 05:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Corn is any sort of grain, in this case just plain old wheat. Maize is of course from the western hemisphere. Adam Bishop (talk) 06:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

If "corn" originally meant, and technically still does mean, any kind of grain, how did the word come to be used most often to refer specifially to maize? (And - no, I don't really expect an answer to this one - but if the Romans ate wheat cakes, why, WHY, why would a handout written for middle-school kids use the word "corn," however technically accurate? No wonder the poor kids can't tell sheep from llamas. [17]) 71.104.119.240 (talk) 06:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

• I don't know why, but as our maize article says, "Outside the British Isles, another common term for maize is "corn". This was originally the English term for any cereal crop. In North America, its meaning has been restricted since the 19th century to maize, as it was shortened from "Indian corn." The term Indian corn now refers specifically to multi-colored "field corn" (flint corn) cultivars." Maybe the American natives didn't grow wheat. I guess your mother teaches in North America, if you think this will be confusing? (If so, I agree, why not just say wheat?) Adam Bishop (talk) 06:53, 14 April 2010 (UTC)
• A guess: That handout was originally prepared from a BrE book (or an AmE book by an academic who cared about the distinction ;-), and whoever did the preparation either was sloppy or uninformed, or did not care. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:36, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Ugh . . . anyone who cares that much about the distinction (and it's not WRONG to call wheat "wheat," after all) shouldn't be writing for seventh graders. (I don't think the handout was from a BrE book - for one thing, it's unlikely there's a BrE book that's perfectly configured to teach California's seventh-grade social studies standards, and for another, I haven't seen any Britishisms crop up in student work, which they certainly would have by now, since these kids seem to think "paraphrase" means "copy the text directly except for a couple of words changed here and there.") Anyway, I think I can consider this pretty much wrapped up. And I suppose with the state of education in the United States today, we've got bigger problems than whether the kids imagine that Caesar liked to chow down on corn-on-the-cob once in a while. 71.104.119.240 (talk) 08:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I think that what Stephan Schulz meant was not that "the handout was from a BrE book", but that whoever wrote the text of the handout probably read that detail in a British book and didn't know enough to "translate" the usage of corn for American students (probably not knowing that "maize" was not, in fact, what was meant). Having worked a bit in the textbook industry, I can say that such mixups (along with downright errors) are quite common in material written for students. Deor (talk) 11:22, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I also think that is likely. The same problem occurs with potatoes, how many people know potatoes are native to South America? Adam Bishop (talk) 14:30, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Time to fire up the old Oxford English Dictionary... "corn" is"a general term the word includes all the cereals, wheat, rye, barley, oats, maize, rice, etc., and, with qualification (as black corn, pulse corn), is extended to leguminous plants, as pease, beans, etc., cultivated for food. Locally, the word, when not otherwise qualified, is often understood to denote that kind of cereal which is the leading crop of the district; hence in the greater part of England ‘corn’ is = wheat, in North Britain and Ireland = oats; in the U.S. the word, as short for Indian corn, is restricted to maize." Anyway, I tend to agree that if this is for US consumption, it is misleading. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:39, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It seems that the Romans made bread out of just about anything[18]. Alansplodge (talk) 23:55, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Thank you all so much! I know all too well the errors that slip into textbooks - I've read about them and I've been known to catch them on occasion. (My high school geography text had gold discovered in California in 1849. If that had been the case, the swarms of miners that headed west to seek their fortune would have gone down in history as "fiftiers" - and then, of course, textbooks would erroneously say that gold was discovered in 1850 . . . ugh.) Textbooks for the lower grades are often particularly slapdash, since the people who know enough to get a contract to write a textbook often believe they have better things to do with their time than simplify their knowledge to a child's level. Since "Romans ate corn" isn't the obvious kind of error that's likely to jump out at you right away, I can see how it slipped through. I mightn't have caught it myself if I hadn't seen it in student work first (I was already in active error-hunting mode, not passive learn-from-a-text mode). If Steven Schulz's theory is correct, it would seem the writer of the materials was as careless a copier as a lot of the students. Ah, I do love irony. 71.104.119.240 (talk) 08:06, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns

Since the term Tomb Guard implies that the soldier actually has to "guard" the tomb, are there any regulations that specify when and how a tomb guard can break-stride and take the necessary steps to protect the tomb? For instance, if someone were to hop the gallery barrier and land on the platform where the tomb is, what is supposed to happen? Does the Tomb Guard actually do anything? I know his gun is unloaded, but I'm sure there's something he must do. Has anything like this ever happened in the past? Jared (t)  09:57, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes. "Today, most of the challenges faced by the Sentinels are tourists who want to get a better picture or uncontrolled children (which generally is very frightening for the parent when the Soldier challenges the child)." So I guess they "challenge" the person, but it doesn't specify what that means. Ariel. (talk) 10:06, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In this photo, the guard not only has a rifle but also it seems to be sporting an unsheathed bayonet; so I'm assuming the guard has multiple options for "challenging" interlopers. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:04, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Have you seen this video? Gabbe (talk) 10:03, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Knowlege

We possess more knowlege today than mankind has ever before, electricity, nuclear power, automobiles, science, technology etc. Is there any sort of project on the go anywhere in the world to ensure that this knowlege is preserved for centuries to come. To clarify, if there was a nuclear war tomorrow, and 99% of humans were gone, all our knowlege would have disapeared. But like the pyramids, some things can last for hundreds of years. Wikipedia is great but will not last hundreds of years after a nuclear war, the project I am thinking of would be for instance to write all the wiki articles onto stone tablets and store them in a pyramid. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.172.58.82 (talk) 10:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Does this count?--droptone (talk) 11:48, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Where would we find the editors willing to do undertake this massive project?!!!--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:06, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It would be a nice gesture, I suppose, but, really, if there was a nuclear war tomorrow and most of the earth's population (humans, animals, and plants) disappeared and we ended up in a post-apocalyptic Stone Age, most of the knowledge we have now would be next to useless for the survivors, who would really be more interested in trying to survive. Maybe a survival guide might be a better idea. Then there is also the problem of storage. It would need to be in a place safe from the apocalypse for it to be still there afterwards, meaning, probably deep underground or in space, or in some other highly inaccessible place to also keep it safe from looters and vandals before the apocalypse - thus defeating its very purpose. This would also probably mean that someone somewhere would need a key for it (or there'd be a couple of keys), which also need to be safely stored and under the control of people who will definitely need to survive in order for the knowledge to be passed on (or used by the 'keepers' to control the uneducated masses after the apocalypse). Sounds like a 'novel' idea, if you pardon the pun. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It probably would not do people in a post-apocalyptic world a whole lot of good if the whole of human knowledge was stored in space as people would have to rebuild a heck of a lot of infrastructure to build a rocket (assuming they still remember how), to go get the knowledge. Probably better to leave the knowledge vault or vaults on earth somewhere. Googlemeister (talk) 13:53, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, yes, I was trying to show how impractical the whole thing could be. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:27, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Or we collect it on the Internet, say, in a collaborative work, so that everyone can take a copy on his USB-Stick/Blueray/Harddrive, and some copies would survive by chance, just as e.g. 600 or so copies of the Iliad did survive the dark ages. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 13:55, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Physical copies of the Iliad don't need computers or electricity to read, though, unlike hard-disks. In order to get to the knowledge, as Googlemeister says above, there would be a lot of rebuilding to do, and if only 1% of the earth's population remain (trying to survive in a post-nuclear ecological disaster area with very limited food resources, large areas of the planet being uninhabitable, climate change, etc.) it would take a very long time. Let's say it took them a few thousand years to come out of their Stone Age to reach a level of infrastructure/civilization/knowledge comparable to our own (at least at a level where they can use computer disks, assuming they can make computers that use the exact same physical connections that would be needed for USB-Sticks, etc.) - language would have undergone huge changes by then and the probability of them being able to read anything of what we had written thousands of years before them (even in all of our languages) would be extremely low, unless they had access to 'ancient texts' (as everything would be to them) and they'd either had a continued line of teaching these 'ancient languages' or were able to decipher them in some way. Then, it can be said, if they had reached a level of knowledge comparable to our own just in order to be able to read what we knew, there would be hardly much they could learn and makes the whole project almost pointless, besides perhaps being an archaeological record of who we were, what we did, and what we knew, essentially, about our world. If it was going to happen - and be quickly helpful to our survivors, it would have to be stone tablets or something, buried deep and away from harm, and everyone would have to know where they were and be able to get to them - deciding on this place would probably be the most difficult thing, though, as we have no way of predicting where the biggest concentration of survivors will be, what changes in climate (or even earthquakes) may do to the geography, and any manner of things. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:27, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

All of you are presuming that after a full-scale nuclear war the Earth would still be habitable. There is also the alarming but possible scenario of the Earth being knocked off its axis!--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 14:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

That presumption was a necessary part of the question, without which it would be nonsensical - 'how can we preserve all of our knowledge for a future planet with no life on it?' --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Sorry, but no, there is not. The amount of energy we can release is minuscule compared to the mass of the Earth. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 14:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Have there been any studies on how long USB drives can be neglected without data corruption? Googlemeister (talk) 15:55, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The Scientology organization is preserving the words of L. Ron Hubbard in durable materials in vaults at various locations (see Trementina Base). In the famous science fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye, the "Motie" civilization is given to recurrent semi-predictable collapses, and "museums" are built with the deliberate intention of preserving knowledge through the dark age periods... AnonMoos (talk) 14:41, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

(EC)Well, there is the theory/hypothesis/whatever - call it what you will - that below one of the pyramids in Giza there is a 'secret' chamber which houses knowledge from a previous period in our history (Edgar Cayce mentioned it, as well as plenty of other psychics, and certain people have tried to find it, having no success for varying reasons). Whether it is true or not, no-one knows, but I suspect that if it were true, in order for it to serve its supposed intended purpose of supplying knowledge and wisdom to survivors of whatever it is that is supposed to have caused that civilisation to collapse, A) there would be a lot more references to its existence and location; and B) it would be a lot more accessible. Unless it was a secret. In which case, what would have been the point? (DISCLAIMER - I do not in any way whatsoever subscribe to this theory, it just 'exists' :) ) --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 14:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Ahem. 600 copies of the Iliad survived the "Dark Ages" because the "Dark Ages" people made copies of it, not by sitting around in a pyramid/Greek temple/Ancient Greek hard-drive.

The idea of creating a "knowledge repository" is a beautiful one, but one should take into account that the preservation of knowledge (or any kind of archeological/textual evidence) is subject to flukes of fate. What if the repository just burned down, like the famed Library at Alexandria ? If this happened, perhaps the creation of the repository would in fact hamper the preservation of knowledge - since, before the fire, people would tend to think "oh, no need to make a copy of this text, it's already in that Great Big Repository !".

You can never know what the fate of a text will be... For instance, it's believed that the works of the Roman historian Tacitus, very valued today by historians, had during the Late Roman Empire fallen out of favor and would have probably disappeared if not for the extensive copying ordered by emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus, who claimed to be a descendant of the historian. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that many "voluntary preservation of knowledge" operations have been made, and have disappeared, so that we cannot today access that knowledge.

However, evidence has an uncanny ability to survive in one form or another - often in forms not intended by the one who "created" that evidence - so I'd not worry too much about a nuclear disaster wiping out everything or whatever. As a last case study, look at Pompei. At the time, the volcanic eruption of 79 AD was a disaster, wiping out a whole town ! Today, it's one of the best things that ever happened for scholars studying Ancient Rome : an unparalleled glimpse at Roman daily life... --Alþykkr (talk) 14:54, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The Rosetta Project might be of interest. It engraves linguistic information onto nickel disks that should survive for millennia. You could do something similar with wikipedia. Even millennia is a cosmic eyeblink though. The book The Earth After Us indicates that after some millions of years, almost no trace will be left on the planet of anything ever done by humans. 66.127.52.47 (talk) 16:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I think this question is concerning a nuclear war in which some people survive, and the knowledge is for their benefit. This is largely the plot of A Canticle for Leibowitz. I have a hard time envisioning something knocking us back to the stone age that doesn't wipe us out all together: the fact that writing exists ensures that we'll remember a lot of what we knew. Surely some people will remember how to smelt iron and make gunpowder. It would be an interesting world: the history would not develop as it did, because people would retain extensive knowledge of how things work (even without a massive encyclopedia), but lack the industrial or political structure to put a lot of it into practice. Buddy431 (talk) 20:12, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

This is a spoiler, but I must mention that the --other-- canonical treatment of this topic is probably The Mote in God's Eye. Comet Tuttle (talk) 22:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Not a spoiler at all, CT, because AnonMoos mentioned it in a bit more detail above. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 00:17, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Some thoughts:

1) I don't think killing off 99% of us would necessarily be enough to wipe out our current technology. That would leave some 70 million people, more than enough to run an advanced society, especially if they all pooled their resources. However, if the people who survived were all in the jungles of Borneo and the Amazon, then we would lose a lot of technology.

2) Is the goal to provide technology immediately to the survivors or only later, once they mature as a society ? A series of satellites in stable orbits would be good, for example, if we want to wait until they regain the ability to travel in space before "revealing our secrets".

3) We might want to be selective about what info we record. If the apocalypse was due to nuclear war, for example, then we might want to skip instructions for building more nukes. We might even want to skip all the advanced physics lessons, allowing them more time to mature before they rediscover all that. StuRat (talk) 22:39, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I think the survivors are more likely to be scattered in small groups across the planet. Sure, enough of them together would probably be able to pool their resources, but this would be a world of very limited resources, as most has been either destroyed or made unusable by radioactivity. Climate change would also be a factor in this. I think in a situation like this, people would be less likely to share with people they don't know very well, and especially so after a war. Survival of one's own group is more likely to be such a priority that it wouldn't matter if it was at the expense of other groups. As for your second and third points, StuRat, it is entirely possible that they may shun technology altogether, as it was the knowledge of this that was the prime cause of them being in their situation and being kicked from their Garden of Eden, as they may come to think of our world as, but at least a knowledge of how it all happened may help them to avoid repeating our mistake. We can't predict any of this, of course. In any case, as a humanitarian gesture it's a wonderful thought, but it would cost too much and wouldn't benefit anyone alive now (so no incentive) or anybody for thousands of years to come. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 22:59, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

There's a similar question being pondered on another ref desk, more specifically about how to preserve wikipedia in the event of a nuclear holocaust. The above discussion might be a tad more serious, though. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:29, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Bathing after eating

Does anyone know why people in certain countries such as Italy and Cuba believe that one has to wait exactly three hours before entering the water following a meal? I live in Italy and the Italians claim bathing can interfere with the digestion process and even the doctors back up this belief. Most Americans and Northern Europeans, however, consider it to be an Old Wives Tale. I'm an American and I was always told as a child not to swim for one hour after eating, but never three hours, and that was swimming not bathing. Do any other editors know why this is so in these countries?--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 12:04, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In the UK it was and probably still is believed. Funnily enough I saw it discussed yesterday on an old episode of QI and as you say, it's just an old wives tale. 86.179.90.197 (talk) 14:05, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

This article says: "There isn’t a clear origin to this particular wives tale, but it has been persistent for years, going back to the 1950’s and beyond. The idea here is that a child—or anyone, for that matter—that goes swimming after eating risks their very life, thanks to the inevitable stomach cramps that come along with the activity. Yet the very lack of those stomach cramps among those who disobey the “rule” about waiting to go swimming after they eat calls foul on the concept...While the belief is prevalent in many countries and in many cultures, there has never been a drowning reported that could be linked to stomach cramps brought on by entering the water too soon after eating...It certainly is possible to have muscle cramps through strenuous exercise, and it is not recommended to over exert oneself directly after eating a big meal, but regular splashing about isn’t likely to bring on the cramps...In some countries, such as Cuba, the waiting time can be as much as three hours for those that ascribe to this particular belief..." Ghmyrtle (talk) 14:10, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It was fairly widely believed in the US in the past, but I never heard "3 hours" (more like one hour). AnonMoos (talk) 14:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Here in Italy people keep their kids out of the water for exactly 3 hours after their mid-day meal. Even if it's five minutes to go, the poor kids have to wait the full three hours! When people see my kids and I going stright into the water they put it down to luck that I haven't been killed yet. LOL. What the Italians doctors claim is that the shock of cool water on the body temperature can block the blood flow to the stomach that's needed to digest the food. The water is actually quite warm, but they still maintain this fallacy. They also think that drinking ice-cold beverages will kill you and that if a child is perspiring he or she needs to be covered to prevent a fever!--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 14:21, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I can testify that it's a common belief in France, too. I really wonder when and how that tale appeared, and how it spread so wide... --Alþykkr (talk) 14:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I guess in a way it would have made sense to most people (even though it's wrong) not to swim after a meal. I'm not sure I'd like to swim the channel immediately after eating a five course meal . Gotta go tuck myself in now and starve this cold of mine. 86.179.90.197 (talk) 15:10, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

There is probably no reason why a child or adult can't enter the water after eating simply to bathe or to wade or float around in a leisurely way. However, as a former serious swimmer, I can testify that energetic swimming within 2-3 hours of a meal sometimes does result in cramps. My cramps were never so severe that I couldn't get to the side of the pool when they hit, but it is remotely conceivable that cramps could cripple a person, which could result in drowning in deep water. In any case, such cramps are likely to disrupt a swimming workout. Again, though, I don't think this would apply to a leisurely dip in water that is no deeper than a person's neck. Marco polo (talk) 15:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

But why would you get more cramps soon after eating ? --Alþykkr (talk) 16:05, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The theory is that the body cuts blood flow to the extremities after eating in order to concentrate resources on the digestion process going on in your middle bits, just as it does in cold weather to maintain your core temperature and protect your vital organs at the expense of your fingers and toes. The extremities are thus more vulnerable to cramping until your stomach has done its thing and the blood flow to the limbs returns to normal. Flailing your blood-starved limbs around in chilly water will inevitably provoke the muscles to cramp, and you will inevitably drown. My granny believed this explanation as an article of faith, but she also had to be physically restrained from rubbing butter into burns. I have no idea whether there is any science behind it. Karenjc 17:06, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

According to Snopes, perhaps not, as the idea was challenged in a medical journal in 1961 and evidently not subsequently supported. Ah, all those swimming opportunities I missed back in the '70s. But my parents were fairly progressive, so we usually only had to wait 30 minutes. —Kevin Myers 20:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I can testify that it was also a widespread belief in Australia when I was growing up. Kids were told: "Don't go swimming straight after eating, or you'll get stomach cramps and sink to the bottom. Wait at least one hour". -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 19:36, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, but that was swimming, and one hour. I was told that as well by my mother to avoid possible cramps. What I'm curious about is the three hours wait Italians (and others) insist upon before dipping into the water. The kids aren't allowed to get their stomachs wet, just their feet until the full three hours have passed!--Jeanne Boleyn (talk) 19:49, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Well, your header says "Swimming after eating", so .... The "swimming" in my post was a generic reference to entering the water and frolicking and gambolling in the glee of acquatic disportment, not necessarily using one's arms and legs as a means of maritime locomotion. Just entering the water at all was a no-no, for at least an hour. Never heard of the 3-hour thing till now. But it's curious that this was such a widespread misbelief. -- Jack of Oz ... speak! ... 21:40, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Alice Bailey

Sorry for the repost but no one has answered my question please help

Is there a religion based on the writings of Alice Bailey specifically A Treatise on Cosmic Fire. I realise she is a Theosophist, but is this a religion, and alot of Theosophy is, well, tripe. But I am very intrigued by her writings, is this a religious movements? Any enlightenment on the subject would be appreciated. Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.172.58.82 (talk) 12:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The article you linked describes several movements linked with her thought. The grouping with a clear link is the Arcane School, which forms part of the Lucis Trust. Whether you describe that as a religious movement would, I suppose, depend on your definition; they state that they don't support any particular creed. Warofdreams talk 14:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Enlightenment is not the natural province of the Reference desk, but you might look at Theosophy for yourself.--Wetman (talk) 23:29, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

short stories dealing with books/literature/reading

Hi, I'm looking for (short) short stories (or at least one) that somehow deal with literature, books or reading. Well, I know Fahrenheit 451 but I'm looking for something much shorter. Google couldn't help me. Can someone here? Thanks in advance. --87.123.219.165 (talk) 15:05, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

These links might be helpful.

• http://www.eastoftheweb.com/cgi-bin/read_db.pl?search_field=&order_by=author_last%2Ctitle&page=1&search_for=reading&x=0&y=0
• http://www.readbookonline.net/search/search.htm?cx=partner-pub-9997146367302884%3Ag8p7pfqnytc&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=reading&sa=Search ----------- *http://www.storybites.com/ -- Wavelength (talk) 15:28, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges instantly comes to mind. --Saddhiyama (talk) 08:40, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

The Fun They Had is a much-anthologised one. --Hence Piano (talk) 09:09, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

dandelions as weeds

Why are dandelions considered weeds? They are not altogether unsightly, they are edible with some good medicinal qualities. Is there a cultural reason why they are not cultivated (similar to the alleged English fear of tomatoes in the 16th and 17th centuries?) Googlemeister (talk) 16:02, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I can buy dandelion greens in my supermarket so they are not altogether uncultivated. Rmhermen (talk) 16:23, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The article Weed describes weeds as plants that grow in unwanted places. I would hazard a guess that dandelions are considered weeds because you can see them practically anywhere - even growing through cracks in the pavement. We don't see many other plants do that, at least ones that are not considered weeds. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:23, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I can think of some reasons:

1) They spread uncontrollably.

2) The leaves are "weed-like", meaning they have spikes. (Yes, roses have thorns and aren't considered weeds, but the flower is better looking on them.)

3) The fluff-ball of seeds is annoying when they blow all over and get on clothes and such. Yes, other plants, like cat tails, do this, too. Some may also consider those to be weeds. StuRat (talk) 16:24, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

(Edit Conflicts) I think the main reason is that, because of their numerous wind-borne seeds, their spread is very hard to control. If cultivated as a flower, they would tend to spread both to areas of one's own garden they were not wanted, and also to one's neighbors' gardens, making one rather unpopular. In addition, they do not grow very densely together, making a bed of dandelions look untidy (though selective breeding might overcome this), and readily colonise lawns which most people prefer to be a monoculture (though I myself like to see a sprinkling of daisies and other smaller flowers on a lawn for contrast). Given their several culinary and medicinal uses, there must presumably be some commercial cultivation by methods which overcome such problems by perhaps unaesthetic means. 87.81.230.195 (talk) 16:32, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, if left alone, they will take over a lawn, which is fine if you want a lawn consisting of dandelions and if the city's zoning laws permit it. Otherwise, they're a royal freakin' pain. It's true that weeds are unwanted plants. For example, a maize plant growing in a soybean field is technically a weed, although the more typical term is "rogue corn" or "volunteer corn". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:35, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

"...if the city's zoning laws permit it..." Really??!!!?? So much for those Americans who think that the UK is a hotbed of "big government" and the tyranny of socialism! Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:13, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It's not the city's zoning laws that matter. Its the Restrictive covenant with the homeowner's association that does. City's don't usually legislate these sorts of things, but HOAs frequently require you to maintain a certain quality of yard, in order to protect home values in the neighborhood they cover. Bugs misspoke here, it isn't the municipality that cares, its your neighbors that do. --Jayron32 21:20, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Cities can also penalize you if your yard is not "kept up", and being overgrown with weeds is one way. That's not "big government" that's "small government". The Federal and State governments couldn't care less. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:54, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Ever see the root structure of a dandelion? They're as thick as your thumb and go on for feet. Some trees don't have roots like a dandelion. HalfShadow 16:39, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

They are liable to be around after humans have vanished from the earth. At home we never tried to poison them or anything, we just dug up the visible ones about once a week. And once they go to seed, you're screwed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

To respons to the OP's idea that they aren't unsightly... The flower is not unsightly, but the flower isn't the problem. The plant puts out a yellow flower that lasts about 2 days before going to seed; but for the rest of its life it is has these low, wide, ground-hugging leaves that crowd out the grass in your lawn, and a giant root system that makes it impossible to remove them. So, your choice is basically an occasional yellow flower and zero grass... Not my idea of a desirable plant. --Jayron32 21:02, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

I can't believe you all are talking about a small photosynthesis factory as though you had a personal grudge against it. Bus stop (talk) 21:20, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

They are always useful if you want to know if you like butter. 86.179.90.197 (talk) 21:27, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

That's buttercup, surely? Ghmyrtle (talk) 21:34, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Dandelions were used too where I came from. Maybe it's the poor mans buttercup. 86.179.90.197 (talk) 21:44, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

The best way to get rid of them ? Convince all the little girls in the neighborhood that they are the prettiest flower of all. They will then pick them whenever they see them. Well worth having a bunch of girls around with dandelions in their hair. StuRat (talk) 21:36, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

ahem...well worth having a bunch of little girls going around with dandelions in their hair? Did I interpret that correctly?--92.251.220.72 (talk) 22:44, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

And to take care of the other problem, convince the kids to pick the leaves and make food out of them. I'm sure when they're all grown up, those kids would look back at those times as their salad days. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:00, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In France, where they really do eat the leaves as salad, they are known as pis-en-lit[19] after a rather undesirable side-affect. Alansplodge (talk) 23:45, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

But only when eaten by French psychiatrists or psychologists.  :) -- 202.142.129.66 (talk) 06:30, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Pissabed is an old English name for them, but as we stopped eating weeds long before the French did, few people now know the name. DuncanHill (talk) 12:04, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Actually, when I was a kid in the North of England, we used to call them wee-the-beds, but it never once occurred to us that people actually ate them. Must be just a southern thing :). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:20, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Right, now we just smoke them. In any case, a name like that is not necessarily enticing for a food product.

Morita Therapy Programs

As a student of Japanese therapy for close to 10 years, I am considering studying to become a Morita Therapist. I am therefore opening this discussion, to learn more about the Morita Therapy programs available in the United States and abroad.

If you are a Morita Therapist, or have undergone a Japanese Therapy training program, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Thank you and kind regards, Kate  [ Unsigned comment added by Kathleensimonelli (talk • contribs) 16:16, 14 April 2010 (UTC)]

For the time being, until you can get a more specific answer, I can point you to our Morita therapy article. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 16:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

KägeTorä suggests the right use of the Reference Desk, which is not an opinion forum.--Wetman (talk) 23:27, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

What is it?

In the proposition "It's raining.", what does "it" refer to? Speculative responses welcome. 86.45.150.20 (talk) 16:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

We beat this Q to death a month ago, on the Language Desk: Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Language/2010_March_7#Nuclear_dummy.3F. StuRat (talk) 16:32, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In this case, I would say "it" refers to the weather. Astronaut (talk) 19:57, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Really? How about "It's dark in here"? Deor (talk) 20:36, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Then "it" would be "the level of luminosity"...or "this room". Vimescarrot (talk) 20:50, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

In all of these cases, "It" is the non-specific third person. English actually lacks a distinct pronoun for such a case, but other languages do not. Consider French, which has 5 third person pronouns: Il and Elle (masculine and feminine singular), Ils and Elles (masculine and feminine plural) and On (non-specific). You use the first 4 when the antecedant is known and distinct, and the last one when it isn't. In English, we use the word "It" for all 5 cases, but the antecedantless "it" is what we have here. --Jayron32 20:58, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Constructions that can't easily be teased apart grammatically are idioms. Historically, idioms come first; grammarians come scrambling along afterwards and try to justify usage.--Wetman (talk) 23:21, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Il pleut?--BandUser (talk) 00:41, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

86.45.150.20 -- You're like the duck in Alice in Wonderland:

'I proceed. "Edwin and Morcar, the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, declared for him: and even Stigand, the patriotic archbishop of Canterbury, found it advisable—"'

'Found what?' said the Duck.

'Found it', the Mouse replied rather crossly: 'of course you know what "it" means.'

'I know what "it" means well enough, when I find a thing', said the Duck: 'it's generally a frog or a worm. The question is, what did the archbishop find?'

-- AnonMoos (talk) 05:59, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Since the OP requested speculative answers, here goes. Considered philosophically, the "it" can be thought to refer to the subject matter of metaphysics, whatever it may be. Some have argued that the preoccupation of Western philosophy with substrates, ontology, things-unto-themselves etc. etc., is pretty much the result of people trying to figure out what "it" is. In Finnish, for instance, "it's raining" is simply "sataa", with no subject, explicit or implicit. The same goes for all so called "state clauses" in Finnish, statements about the prevailing state of affairs such as "it is summer", or "it is dark in here". The question of what "it" is thus does not even arise in Finnish (but does of course preoccupy Finnish philosophers as well, since they get most of their material from Indo-Europeans). Actually, I should check how that particular passage in Alice's adventures, which again proves that the book is relevant to everything, has been translated into Finnish.--Rallette (talk) 06:25, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

GK History Geography question

I am looking for the name of a famous historical woman who has many names. Her family members protected her from invaders by killing them all.She was from a location (mountainous rock) at the entrance of a bay

I would appreciate any help —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.93.78.214 (talk) 17:11, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

If we help you, will you split the prize with us? --TammyMoet (talk) 19:25, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Got it. But I'm sending in the answer myself.--Wetman (talk) 23:19, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Advantages of big countries over numerous small countries?

Why would one big country, in say, South Africa or Europe be better than the countries there maintining their sovereignety? What advantages and disadvantages does one large unified country have over numberous small ones?--92.251.220.72 (talk) 22:33, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

It seems to me that it entirely depends on the relationship between the nations. If they cooperate, have free trade, and don't make war with each other, many small countries could collectively be like the EU or even the various states in the US. On the other hand, if they constantly make war on each other, it could be a disaster. StuRat (talk) 22:46, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

To put it simpler, what are the advatages and disadvantages of the USA compared to the EU.--92.251.220.72 (talk) 22:47, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

(EC) That's a completely different question. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 23:14, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Two completely different beasts, historically. Even if it wanted to, Europe couldn't be a USA because of history and inertia thereof. While certain states feel as though they were sovereign, they aren't, whereas most of the EU at one point or another is, or at least was. I think many of the advantages and disadvantage will arise from that fact.72.2.54.36 (talk) 23:07, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

Many of the US states were sovereign, at one time. The original 13 colonies once had an even weaker link than the EU, under the Articles of Confederation. Both Texas and California were independent republics, briefly. Hawaii was an independent monarchy. StuRat (talk) 23:20, 14 April 2010 (UTC)

One of the best advantages in the US over the EU is a common native language, English. The EU is perhaps more comparable to India, which like Europe has many local languages as well as the national language of Hindi, and a lot of usage of English also. English seems destined to become the world's universal language eventually, but I'm not sure all the members of the EU would be that keen on the idea. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:03, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

A good article to read would be federalism, which is a broad term that encompasses both what the USA's states and the EU's member nations have done. The article has many subtopic links that will be of interest; the US-specific one calls out a lot of the problems that caused the US states to form a stronger federal government. Comet Tuttle (talk) 00:24, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Slightly related: the theory of Optimum currency areas (though the Wikipedia article's focus maybe doesn't make it very relevant to the question asked here). Jørgen (talk) 07:41, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Europe is not a country.

However, at the basic level the advantages of size are predominantly economies of scale, although that has to be traded against complexity and the cost of managing a greater area and population.

The advantages can be replicated through free trade, free movement of population resource, and harmonised economic models without the need to federate.

ALR (talk) 08:52, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

April 15

Zoning

Hey, I have a question about some zoning laws that I don't udnerstnad. I am NOT looking for legal advice--I can afford a lawyer if I need one. In my city zoning or some similar kind of laws forbid raising farm animals (such as chickens, ducks, sheep, etc) in my neighborhood. Does this include pheasants, as pheasants are more of a game animal than farm animal? I want to raise one for a pet. Thanks! --Posted by: Zoned out about zoning laws —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.210.138.52 (talk) 01:39, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Every city's zoning laws are different, so your best bet would be to call your city government office and ask them. One thing about raising a pheasant - if it misbehaves, you can have it for dinner. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:43, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

By the same token, if your cat misbehaves you can just make a tennis racket. PhGustaf (talk) 01:52, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

That would require some guts. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:55, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Yes, sheep guts. Catgut is not generally made from cat. AlmostReadytoFly (talk) 08:56, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Articles like that illustrate the wonders of human ingenuity. I can see this caveman Grog saying to himself, "Well, yesterday I invented the wheel. What shall I do today? Maybe if I take the intestines from a lean animal with the toughest gut, clean it, free it from fat, steep it for some time in water, scrape off the external membrane with a blunt knife, steep it again for some time in an alkaline lye, smooth and equalize by drawing out, subject to the antiseptic action of the fumes of burning sulphur, dye if necessary, sort into sizes, and twist together into cords of various numbers of strands, maybe I can make a stringed musical instrument from it. But what shall I call the instrument? The strings would be like little tubes, so maybe I'll call it a 'tuba'." [inventors are not always known for their marketing skills] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:28, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

A non-organic application of the logic behind Intelligent Design? 87.81.230.195 (talk) 11:46, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

You know, Arthur Clarke implicitly postulated "intelligent design" in the book version of 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that book, the actual first invention was a nuclear thighbone. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:54, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

If your kid misbehaves, you can also have him for dinner, probably several dinners. Plus, the other kids will tend to behave after that. :-) StuRat (talk) 01:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

You'd obviously need to check with your zoning board to find out how they interpret the rules. There have been cases of other people wanting to keep animals as pets which are normally considered food, particularly the pot-bellied pig. So, they might allow it, or they might take a hard line and say "once we allow one pheasant in we'll have hundreds of requests for variances". If you tell them you intend to keep the bird in a cage inside, they would probably be more willing to allow it. StuRat (talk) 01:48, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I don't know from pheasants, but I've got a pet wolverine, and I wanna tell ya, nobody messes with me anymore. Least of all, the animal control folks. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:52, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

It depends on the local codes, and in some cases, they may not be well defined. In my city, we do not allow farm animals, but there was an exemption specifically made for fowl, including chickens, ducks, and quail. If no one's ever tried to raise pheasants before, then it's quite likely that no one has even ever decided whether pheasants are allowed or not. I agree, call up the city government. And hopefully, if you're just raising it as a pet (rather than running a big operation), your neighbors would be decent enough to not complain. And if you keep it inside all the time, practically speaking, no one would know (though really, I'm sure that a pheasant would appreciate getting out in the yard to strut around and eat insects). Buddy431 (talk) 02:47, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

If it never gets a chance to go out and play, it could become an unpleasant pheasant. Unless he trains it to watch soap operas all day. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:26, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Who this in this picture?

The German text says it is "Elisabeth, duchess of Bavaria. Died 1314, daughter of duke Heinrichs 13 of Niederbayern. In the garb of the cistercians". --Saddhiyama (talk) 08:43, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

That can be mean a lot of person because Elisabeth is a very common name in the Wittelsbach family and duchess of Bavaria can mean a daughter or wife of a Duke of Bavaria. And who is Heinrich the thirteenths? Ok I found who is she is now. She became a nun and was the daughter of Henry XIII, Duke of Bavaria--Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 09:00, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Wittelsbach heir of the Kingdom of Greece

After King Otto's death he made Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria his heir as pretender and because Luitpold's son Louis III renounced his claim to Greece it passed to Luitpold's second son Prince Leopold of Bavaria. But after Leopold wikipedia doesn't list who comes next. I can only guess that it passed to his son Prince Georg than his other son Prince Konrad and finally his grandson Prince Eugen. Does anybody know for sure if this is correct and who wpuld come after Eugen?--Queen Elizabeth II's Little Spy (talk) 08:56, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Sculpture of Cleopatra - is that what she really looked like?

The Cleopatra VII is illustrated by a picture of a sculpture or bust of herself. Is that what she really looked like, or was it just something made centuries later? Similar busts of Roman emporers look realistic rather than idealised, and perhaps in part served to identify him, so were likely to be authentic representations. The Cleopatra bust has quite a big nose, like that of the image on the picture of a coin. 92.29.104.157 (talk) 10:58, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

If the caption on the photo is accurate, it's contemporary, although it seems to be in remarkably good shape. If the coins are also contemporary, then her big nose and braided hair would seem to be consistent. And probably closer to the mark than this:File:Guido Cagnacci 003.jpg ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:14, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Repeating the same detail of the same Wikipedia article, and part of the OPs question as well, is not a terribly good answer to a question about a detail in that Wikipedia article being authentic. 92.29.104.157 (talk) 11:37, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Getting snippy with those are trying to answer a question, for free, is not a terribly good attitude to cop. You asked if the sculpture was made centuries later, so I assumed you had not read the details on it. The sculpture's description says it's first century B.C. That would be contemporary with Cleopatra. If the coins are contemporary, then they are consistent. And you've seen noses bigger than that, so what basis do you have for questioning its realism. If anything, it might be more realistic than the Roman emperor busts which tried to make them look like gods or something. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:51, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

What Bugs presumably did to get information about this bust was to click on the image and go to this page: [20]. The German caption on the page states that the bust is from the 1st century B.C., that is, the time when Cleopatra lived. The caption info states that the bust is in a museum in Berlin. This information is confirmed here. The latter site mentions one scholar's opinion that the bust was created in Italy rather than Alexandria, but at a time when Cleopatra was still alive, making it fairly likely that the bust was based on a likeness. Marco polo (talk) 14:41, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Hello Wikipedia Administrators

Hello Wikipedia Administrators. I want to inform you about the necesity of updatein a page on wikipedia the one about the polish catastrofy in the international response section. The Romanian Government anounced yesterday official mourning for 18 April but this doesn't appear on the page...and I am not familiar with doing this myself. please add Romania to the mourning nations in the list and on the map.Thank you —Preceding unsigned comment added by Eddy89 (talk • contribs) 11:20, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

This is not a question for the Reference Desk. You should post this request on the 'Discussion' page of the page you are referring to. I would do this myself, but as you have not provided a link to the page in question, I have no idea which it is. Therefore, please go back to that page, and look above. You will see a 'Discussion' tab. Click on that and it will bring you to the article's 'Discussion Page' (also called 'Talk Page'). You will then see another set of tabs, one of which is 'New Section'. Click on that and post your request. Hope this helps. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 11:47, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

He's most probably referring to the crash of the Tupoljev plane about a week ago: 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash. Since I last checked the article, the international response has been moved to a separate article: International response to the 2010 Polish Air Force Tu-154 crash. To Eddy: Doing as KageTora suggested would be the fastest and most appropriate way, yes. TomorrowTime (talk) 13:23, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Free business cards

What is the catch with "free" business cards? Do they have the provider's advert on the rear side? 92.29.104.157 (talk) 12:11, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Can you provide a link to an example? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:13, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

(EC)Are you talking about "free business cards" in general, or free business cards from a particular provider? If the former, then all I can say is that in general some will and some won't and ones that do will have it either on the front or the back, depending on the provider. If the latter, then we have no idea unless you tell us which provider you are talking about, and, in fact, it may be just simpler to ask them directly. --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 12:15, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

The ones I've had in the past have the supplier's details on the back of the card, and a limited selection of styles and designs. That said, I've found them very worthwhile for my Scouting. DuncanHill (talk) 12:24, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

www.vistaprint.co.uk 92.29.104.157 (talk) 12:30, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

There are some general "rip-off" business models that might apply here:

A) "We will send you an (absurdly small) sample absolutely free ! If you like them, you need do nothing; we will send you more each month (at an absurdly high price). If you aren't satisfied, you may cancel your subscription at any time (or you could, if we actually answered our phones)."

B) "Absolutely free ! You just pay the shipping and handling fee (which is enough to ship it from Pluto). If you aren't satisfied, simply return the unused portion, and we will refund the entire purchase price (but not the shipping and handling)." StuRat (talk) 12:40, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

As well as printing their name on the back. The OP could have answered his own question by following the process through (up to a point) on that link. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:43, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

The supplier I've used (which is also the one named above by the original questioner) does charge postage, but the cards are still substantially cheaper than I could source them locally from a printer (and vastly and amazingly cheaper & better looking than they would be if I printed them off from my PC). DuncanHill (talk) 12:54, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I use that supplier too and often wonder what the catch is with them. I've only had one minor quibble with the printing in 3 years. The supplier's name is in print so small I can't read it! If anyone knows how they make their money, please let me know! --TammyMoet (talk) 13:01, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Enough free customers will go on to order paid-for goods. The cost of printing cards is vanishingly small if you have a sufficiently super printer, and the goodwill and consumer inertia generated by the free offers will make the costs worthwhile. DuncanHill (talk) 13:06, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Thanks. A supplemental question is - I would like just a plain white card without any graphics or lines or anything, just the plain print in black ink with all my details centred, my name in somewhat larger print than the rest of it. Does anyone know how to get this from Vistaprint or elsewhere please? All the ones I've seen have graphics of some kind. 92.29.104.157 (talk) 13:36, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

Just be aware - Vistaprint has numbers of customers who express satisfaction with the service (I have used them myself, the cards were of OK-ish quality, and we had no subsequent problems). However, I have been told personally, and have read online, that others have had difficulties with what they claim are unauthorised debits from their card accounts after purchase. One such example is here. This may or may not be down to customers misunderstanding what they are signing up for, but if you are planning to use them I would suggest a spot of googling and a careful look through a selection of customer reviews, which may help you avoid making mistakes with their ordering system. Karenjc 14:17, 15 April 2010 (UTC)

I did have this happen to me because of a mistake with the ordering system. However, I was sufficiently impressed with the attitude of their customer service department - who refunded every payment I'd ever made to VP, as a mark of goodwill - to keep on with them. It hasn't happened since, and I think because of the public outcry in the UK about it, they've changed their ways. --TammyMoet (talk) 14:45, 15 April 2010 (UTC)