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May 9

Screaming at concerts

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

Do they scream at Justin Bieber concerts? (Or did they before he started accumulating some bad press?) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:02, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It never stopped. Some bands attract screamers and some don't. Remember that the Kinks were a pop act that attracted young people (who tend to do the most screaming, especially the girls). They are old now. New bands attract the screaming, like One Direction and acts like that. Mingmingla (talk) 15:52, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My wife took our 14 year-old daughter to a One Direction concert last year. The audience screaming was so bad that my wife's ears hurt for a few hours afterwards. Girls still scream at concerts.59.167.253.199 (talk) 05:31, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This article from 1993] does a pretty good job of giving the overview of scholarship on girls screaming at concerts. It cites the works of sociologists and psychologists who have looked at the phenomenon. --Jayron32 17:58, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
More: I've seen a few blogs and discussion forums (like here) that note that Erich Fromm discussed this very phenomenon in his work The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. --Jayron32 18:02, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here's another interesting article that traces music concert "mania" back to... Franz Liszt and the Lisztomania of the 1840s.[1] (The young Liszt actually did have a pretty amazing head of hair along with his musical talent...) Charles Lindbergh and Rudolph Valentino had hordes of screaming fans too. OttawaAC (talk) 21:01, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It still happens on TV singing competitions. As soon as the audience recognise the song, they start screaming (as if to drown it out), then they tend to grow quiet (as if to actually listen to the the performance), until the "climax note", when they all scream again (as if to drown it out once more. Crazy. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Given the manufactured nature of such shows, and the fact that live TV shows often have audience warm-up phases where the producers get the audience into the state desired for the broadcast part of the show, the screaming is presumably a desired behaviour. It doesn't impress me, but then I'm not normal. I wonder who it does impress? HiLo48 (talk) 22:44, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Vince McMahon. His top dog this last decade has been raking in the cash, primarily on his ability to make low-voiced people want to outscream high-pitched ones. It's acoustically impossible, but the resulting cacophony is good for business (and what is pro wrestling, but the concert business with less music?) InedibleHulk (talk) 23:24, May 9, 2014 (UTC)

Resting place of Kings of Naples

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

According to the Italian wikipedia they are all buried in the sacristy of San Domenico Maggiore in Naples: "According to tradition, the whole Aragonese dynasty (1442-1503) was buried there and among the bodies was also present that of King Alfonso V of Aragon, called the Magnanimous, who died in 1458, whose remains however were transferred to Spain in 1668 [my translation]." --Cam (talk) 15:24, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have more details (monarch, burial place):

Ferdinand I, San Domenico Maggiore [2]

Alfonso II, Messina Cathedral [3]

Ferdinand II, San Domenico Maggiore [4]

Frederick, "chiesa dei minimi di Plessis-les-Tours" (~~Couvent des Minimes de la Place Royale?~~); in 1562 his tomb was broken into and the bones scattered. [5]

--Cam (talk) 15:42, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Scattered in the tomb, or outside? InedibleHulk (talk) 05:47, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

The source says le ossa di F. vengono disperse "Frederick's bones are dispersed" (historical present). His tomb was one of those destroyed during the French Wars of Religion (others include that of Saint Irenaeus and Saint Francis of Paola).--Cam (talk) 18:44, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

I think it has to do with the Constitution. It states that the Vice President's role is head of the Senate, and only becomes Acting President when the current one is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office", according to the 25th Amendment, which I don't think applies when the President is, say, traveling to Serbia or wherever. And plus, the rules vary from state to state because of different constitutions and junk. today too, i don't necessarily think that it's more logical that way in the federal government, because the president and vice president are more and more frequently out of the country and what happens then/? ~Helicopter Llama~ 20:31, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not only the constitution, which is the correct answer, but also the fact that presidents attend foreign funerals and conferences as heads of state, while governors don't, and the most recent amendment, the 25th, addressing this after Kennedy's assassination, was written in the instant telecommunication age. μηδείς (talk) 20:48, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Governors attend out-of-state functions too. Every constitution is different, and part of it probably is date, but part is probably the importance of the president: Changing presidents is a big deal (the acting president could start a war), while it generally doesn't matter too much if a LG officially takes over once in a while. Most people won't even be aware that the LG has taken over, but imaging the uproar if Cheney had been acting president. — kwami (talk) 20:52, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bad example. "If"? --jpgordon^{::==( o )} 22:23, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I see what you did there...--Jayron32 02:12, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

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

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

The Associated Press is wrong here; Wilson was the first president to travel outside the United States. See Canal Zone, a US territory, which is what Roosevelt was visiting. Nyttend (talk) 13:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How did TR get from DC to Panama without leaving US territorial waters? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:11, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Monroe Doctrine?^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 06:01, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why are SATs and ACTs at like 7 am?

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

the brain is more active and efficient in the morning, long tests need plenty of time, and college board simply loves torturing their american teenagers <3 ~Helicopter Llama~ 22:13, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Don't mornings usually involve things like being at least 30 minutes after the minimum physically possible full-sleep time (8:30 for teenagers), to allow for travel? Although it'd be possible with prescription medicine. Or flying 1 or 2 thousand miles to the west (if allowed), or traveling slowly to the east spending enough time to acclimate to the local astronomical and horological conditions followed by a mad dash to the test, similar to mountain climbers. I'm serious. I know I'm not exaggerating because I went east by bus at age 15.4. It took me all of 4 hours to notice the 7% faster time. "Why'd it get dark so soon? Oh, local solar time". I didn't notice 2 straight days of 25 hours on the way there. I feel sorry for people who live in my time zone and 10° to the west. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 00:17, 10 May 2014 (UTC) (Also, I didn't notice the change to 24 hour days in between (I had 2 1/2 of them) so this is definitely a circadian incompatibility to losing as little as 18 minutes from a 24 hour day. The next 2 days felt short, like slight time traveling — they were 23 hours. I didn't like them.) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also, my other question got late morning as the time of peak performance. The test proper starts about the time otherwise known as brushing your teeth or sleep. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The test is administered by people whose biological clocks consider that a decent time to be up and about, instead of taking into consideration that teenagers are naturally more awake a couple hours later. Ian.thomson (talk) 22:16, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's good preparation for jobs that demand high level performance over very long and inconvenient hours. HiLo48 (talk) 22:36, 9 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And who's forcing you to choose to work 7-5? Work 9-5, live within 15 minutes, eat in the train or car, and you get a full sleep up 30 minutes later than the minimum you're capable of (midnight) to. So the reverse affirmative action for a group already favored by life (teens physically capable of sleeping b4 11; teens who's parents would find a doctor or buy a few points with medium-haul air tickets thus showing cash, convinceability and helpfulness that'll help them all life) and hour minimum of sleep deprivation is a purposeless prep for something that doesn't have to happen. An infringement of liberty, too. G-d, if any parents would let their Eastern Time kids test in Denver instead of taking the drugs because they heard the hour of medicated sleep is slightly less restorative than natural sleep then those kids won't ever need their diploma.Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Not if your shift's usually from 3 pm to midnight. Ian.thomson (talk) 00:38, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think any other English-speaking countries would start tests quite as early as that. Some children must be having to get up and five, and probably not have any breakfast. Is there a logistical reason for it? Itsmejudith (talk) 00:57, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the US's defense it's actually 8am but no one would arrive that late, and I just could not perform well on the Formula One-like ACT without time to relax first which is why I remember the dreaded 7 (I arrived 7:something). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's still earlier than any exam I've taken. GCSEs and A-levels generally start at 9am if they're morning exams, with a few exceptions at 11am and things like that. 9am is the time most people expect to start a workday or a schoolday (most schools start roughly half an hour earlier, but in such a way that lessons start at roughly 9): why would you start an exam earlier than that? Does the exam take more than 6 hours to complete? 86.146.28.229 (talk) 10:10, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It takes some time for the teachers who are administering the test to ensure that everyone has number 2 pencils... then hand out the test material... then read the test instructions out loud, and make sure that everyone understands how to correctly fill in the little ovals ... etc. etc. Only after all these (mandatory) preliminary steps are done, can the actual testing begins... and by then it is a more reasonable hour. Blueboar (talk) 02:58, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That still doesn't solve the problem that it's physiologically impossible for some to fall asleep before ~11, except in cases of prescription medicine or much worse preparatory sleep deprivation that I didn't want to do (I might've needed up to 2 hours of undersleep for up to 3 days to achieve 10pm, I don't remember, I tend to not make up sleep on that side). I remember feeling sleep deprived at least an hour after the preliminaries started. The ACT starts with a 45 minute barrage of almost a hundred questions and the SAT has harder questions, that's what you want to do sleep deprived? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 05:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ever travelled to a different time zone? HiLo48 (talk) 06:16, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

By bus at age 15.4, in mid-February. I went due west of New York for 2 days. I did the reverse after 62 hours. So 2 dusks were an hour late (gaining 2 hours), then 2 were on-time. I didn't feel anything. I learned that could live in 25 hour solar days for the rest of my life. I didn't even think of time after that, until dark came only 0.3 hours early and I suddenly realized it "The day's over already? Oh right, local solar time" It took me only 4 hours to notice and dislike "107% speed time". If the Earth accelerated to 23:42 I might not be able to keep up. The next 2 days felt short, like slight time traveling — they were 23 hours. I didn't like them. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not a teen anymore but I still don't mind a 4am bedtime. If it doesn't pass 4 then sleeping an hour later is as easy as staying still. 2 hours is still easy. I've gone from 12 to 4am in one night a few times. (sometimes that's mediumly hard but 2-3 times it was easy) I still can't sustain evening sleep. Or go backwards (note my reaction to 23:42 days). Non-prescription sleeping pills can only help like 15 minutes and just make me uncomfortable for nothing before that. I wanted a quicker fix so I found out what the side effects of going above the standard dose were and what would warn me that I'm nearing irreversible damage. I just could not sleep more than unless it felt close to surgical anesthesia. That would've worked awesome, I wish I could have something that felt like that did. I took 1 more pill every 11 till I reached 10 pills. I hoped that by 10 (10!) the irresistible force might finally move the immovable object and I'd finish the bedtime relocation in one night. Instead I just got sleepier then I've ever been in my life and it could never be ended by sleep. I'd always fell asleep fast when I was very sleepy before. The anxiety might be psychotropic. I think I even got sleepy and alert at the same time. And the worst flavor of sleepiness, maybe even worse than 2-5 hour sleep-deprived sleepiness. I think I felt a little like falling. It felt like an illegal drug. I didn't get "high" but they don't all make you "high". It was starting to make my lungs uncomfortable. I thought this might be like a weaker version of what a lethal injection feels like, with a different heart drug. My eyes got sore from the closing, and I only did that when it was working. My heart was beating twice as fast and even though the way it was decelerating maybe 100 pills wouldn't fail a heart from exhaustion and that was "the sign" I decided to never take this drug again. (Prolly hell on earth if you were conscious 100 pills, though) It only made it easy to sleep after I woke from sufficient sleep. Fucking pills. It was hard not to nap then. Don't do this, it's very unpleasant and I don't know what effects this has on the liver, though it was brief.

After that, I took 10 melatonin pills and listened to the most sleep-inducing song ever made, according to scientists, thrice. A song which has a non-zero chance of making you involuntarily sleep while driving. I thought this was guaranteed to make me sleep 4 hrs early in one swoop. Didn't work. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm certain that there's a gender difference here and that boys' brains have been proved to function best later in the morning than girls', but I can't find a reference at this moment (maybe it's too early!). Alansplodge (talk) 08:28, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Confirmation! I'm male. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I got relevant Google search results from these papers: Gender, the Brain and Education: Do Boys and Girls Learn Differently? by Angela Josette Magon, Do Later School Start Times Really Help High School Students? Evidence supports later school starts for high school students. John Cline, Ph.D. and A’s from Zzzz’s? The Causal Eﬀect of School Start Time on the Academic Achievement of Adolescents, USAF Academy. I'm afraid you'll have to read them to find out if there's anything pertinent to your query - good luck. Alansplodge (talk) 17:35, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My high school classes started at 6:45 AM, the bus picked us up at 6 AM, I had to leave home at 5:30 AM to get to the bus stop in time, and it took me a couple hours in the morning to shower, shave, eat breakfast, get dressed, etc., so I had to be up at 3:30 AM, and had to set my alarm to 3 AM to get up then. To get 8 hours sleep, then, I had to be in bed by 7 PM, even when it was light out and people were making lots of noise. It was like a conspiracy to deny me my sleep. I ended up napping for hours every day after school.

I think the reason the high school started so early was that they used the same buses for high school, starting at 6:45, middle school, starting at 7:30, and elementary school, starting at 8:15. Still, you'd think they could have shifted everything at least an hour later. StuRat (talk) 01:49, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That systematic early childhood abuse explains a lot of things I've often wondered about, Stu. Thanks for sharing. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:45, 13 May 2014 (UTC) [reply]

Adriano fiorentino

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

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

May 10

Carlist and the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830

Was the Pragmatic Sanction of 1830 created with a mind to the tradition of Spanish male-preference cognatic primogeniture?--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 01:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to our article, yes. The succession of the Bourbon monarchs of Spain was an open question; Spanish tradition allowed daughters of the King to inherit if there was no sons; in fact the various Spanish kingdoms had numerous regnant queens throughout history. The problem came when the Bourbons (a French dynasty) inherited. The French did not allow women to inherit (or even to trace a line of inheritance through a woman). It wasn't a problem until Ferdinand had two daughters and became very sick; he didn't want his brother to inherit, so he made explicit that he would follow Spanish (not French) tradition in the matter. --Jayron32 02:24, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kangar paintings

Ok folks, any art experts up for a challange?

Recently, I took another look at File:Shamirpu1.jpg

and found an identical artwork was mentioned here:

http://blog.artoflegendindia.com/2010/12/kangra-paintings-painting-art-of-kangra.html

Is the image a specfic work, if so whose the artist? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 08:16, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You'll find the details you need here: http://www.artoflegendindia.com/summer-p-4293.html

From the description: "This beautiful Indian painting "Summer"of Kangra style, depicts ... an illustration from a baramasa (the twelve months) series of the month of March-April, which is the first month of the traditional Indian calendar. The verses describe the splendor of the blossoming spring landscape and the sexually exhilarating effect of the season on peacocks and maidens. The painting depicts Krishna standing on a garden terrace with Radha who is trying to persuade the blue skinned lord to stay with her rather then goes traveling during the month. In the background of the painting is a landscape."

You will see that the painting is attributed to a Mr Gopal, and is described as being in the style of Kangra painting. I suspect that it's simply a modern painting in a classical style, rather than an original piece from the 17th-19th century.

RomanSpa (talk) 09:40, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You will note that the description is wrong, as the picture does not actually contain any peacocks, sexually exhilarated or otherwise. RomanSpa (talk) 09:41, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

RomanSpa, the description doesn't say the picture contains any peacocks, just that the poem it accompanies does. Rojomoke (talk) 11:54, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Excellent point. I was obviously too exhilarated myself. :-) RomanSpa (talk) 11:56, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK Tagged the file above as F7 (given that it's not an old image.), There are presumably public domain examples of Kangara paintings? Sfan00 IMG (talk) 10:07, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Schools making kids tour hardened Correctional facilities

I've been reading and watching videos about crime and punishment especially in the U.S. And I can't help wondering, if kids from neighborhoods with a history of youth delinquency were made to see these facilities for themselves, surely the experience would deter them. In particular just imagine being made to tour a facility such as Angola, in Louisiana. Perhaps this would solve the problem of 'black ghettos' which have a reputation of broken families leading to a cycle of youth pregnancy, gangs, narcotic abuse etc that seems to repeat generation after generation.

So my question is are as follows.

1) Have trips to correctional facilities been organised before?

2) Does it offer a deterrent to individuals especially in areas with a history of juvenile gang violence, homicides, robberies etc.

3) Would shipping kids off to see how bad it is getting locked up really be a feasible deterrent.

4) Would it likely have the support of voters. This might be a bit more complicated though in areas with racial tensions.

5) What loop hole could be used to justify such trips (part of humanities classes, or some other class)

If all else fails, it begs the question. What is prison in the U.S. If it's not a deterrent then it's simply punishment. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.6.96.72 (talk) 10:15, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Students studying Legal Studies at the higher levels in Australian high schools do such visits, but that's a somewhat special subset of students.— Preceding unsigned comment added by HiLo48 (talk • contribs)

As for 3) the problem is that kids are really poor at risk assessment, especially when it comes to things that might happen in the far future. If you tell kids that smoking might kill them ten or twenty years in the future, it wont stop them from smoking. But tell them that smoking damages your complexion right away, and it will have an effect. I'm sure that we have an article on that, but my wikipediasearch-fu has failed me. Sjö (talk) 10:45, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

For (1), you want them to be Scared Straight! and Beyond Scared Straight. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:50, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

With America having 24% of the world's prison population, you might consider that putting so many people behind bars is part of the problem. See United States incarceration rate and list of countries by incarceration rate. Ssscienccce (talk) 11:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

15-25% of America's prisoners are unfazeable psychopaths physiologically incapable of feeling fear or anxiety who would literally disembowel a child with a chainsaw if it's the easiest way to get a dollar and feel that's normal. Only if they don't think that they're going to get caught, though. Some amount of the rest are sadists, who do have empathy but their victims' pain of sodomy causes the same feelings in them as our love's affection or cunnilingus reaction does to us. Remember that American who caught teen boys and killed them with injections of acid into their conscious brains? Clearly we are doing a good job. Despite having the same genes as everyone else we have more broken homes than industrialized Europe and East Asia because they didn't have slaves which they never helped enough and are more advanced. Many of the rest are only in for drug addiction and should be in rehab. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:51, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. Got a source for the claim in that first sentence, and for "we are doing a good job"? 2. Europe had slaves for much longer than the USA. HiLo48 (talk) 17:59, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. The very fact that such numerous parasitic intraspecies predators are not in public means we are doing a good job. We can simulataneously be doing a bad job in other areas (even the remaining intraspecies predators). 2. Europe didn't have slaves, they sent them to colonies. The land was developed, they didn't need them. If you mean pre-Columbian slaves, now bear with me but this is why descendants of European nations' slave are much different than many (most?) others': Many soldiers who were stationed in a war zone on the Empire's edge for years gained a desire for marriage. The pale, light haired, light eyed natives were considered exotic and angelic ("they're not Angles they're angels") So they married them and introduced genes for those things. Even if they were all slaves and for some reason she isn't freed for decades after marriage (doubt it), the head of the household was in a respected social class of freemen. Who would want their child to be their slave? So I think for the sake of the father the children would not be slaves, thus removing the last ways to tell by sight if someone was a slave descendant for discrimination purposes. For different reasons, both the non-slaves (except for the luckiest) and the slaves became serfs, apparently Christians freed their slaves by 1000 and the Slavery in the British Isles1100s in England]]. Europe isn't well known for Jim Crow-type "former slave as opposed to former peasant" laws. If some felt like discriminating against them they would have to go through the effort to keep tabs on who was born from whom and prevent fusation by intermarriage. I think even power-obsessed pagan Romans who looked down on slaves didn't discriminate against their descendants as much as America did. Anyway the two groups probably completely fused from intermarriage. And most people still lived close to the subsistence level. (farming) It did not effect things that the free had a 10,000 year head start. Descendants of US slaves however had middle class whites to catch up to, were strictly subjugated till the 60s (see Jim Crow), and some were still serfs for crying out loud. (Though controlled — (the general population would choke you to death if you killed or raped a white person)). Then they were suddenly "freed" without help during a social revolution (against "the Man") and maybe like a sixth or something became criminals. Many left the Jim Crow area then. The median net worth of black households is $4,955 in 2010, or about 4.5% of whites ($110,729). [7] Without socialism, inequalities persist forever, as edges are the edge to gain a bigger edge. Do you play chess? When I had slightly more than a player that's hard to beat (he started with 1 bishop), it doesn't seem overwhelming at first, but he started to lose stuff faster than me until finally I had way more. I could've taken every piece if that was the winning condition. It's like that, except with gain instead of attrition. (G-d, even my dad has 4 times the usual black household's money, and he buys $1,825/yr of lotto and tries his obsession with contrarian stock shorting whenever he has much more than now)

That figure still leaves (up to) two thirds you're not sure about, just in the quarter you seem to be sure about. That's about 230,000 individual brains you deemed not worth counting with one hyphen. If a source does exist to back that up, it's not worth much. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:32, May 10, 2014 (UTC)

HiLo48, InedibleHulk: From the University of Chicago article Psychopaths are not neurally equipped have concern of others: "20 percent to 30 percent of the male and female U.S. prison population." (maybe jailing of drug users getting less favor has increased the number?). This is remarkably effective as the source says psychopaths are only 1% of the general population and the extreme concentration would be higher were it not for those able to get lots of cash with less risk from law, politics, or business. Can't gain or enjoy cash/power/belt notches in jail. (That's all they live for.) 120 IQ suffices for those jobs. (Where do you think so many criminal defense lawyers come from? The very fact that such numerous parasitic intraspecies predators are not in public means we are doing a good job. We can simulataneously be doing a bad job in other areas (even the remaining intraspecies predators).

You want sources? I got sources. [8] In 2012, there were 1,341,797 state prisoners. Of these, 222,738 were in for drug offenses, 55,013 who were only convicted for possession. 717,861 serving time for violent offenses, 249,574 for property offenses (like stealing, embezzling etc. I guess), 142,230 for public order offenses (which include weapons, drunk driving, court offenses, commercialized vice, morals and decency offenses, liquor law violations, and other public-order offenses), and 9,392 for other/unspecified.

There were 196,574 federal prisoners. Of which 99,426 were in for drug offenses, 11,688 for violent offenses, 11,568 for property offenses, and 72,519 for public order offenses (of which 23,700 were sentenced for immigration offenses, 30,046 for weapons offenses, and 17,633 other public order offenses). Out of 1,538,371. It doesn't say who's in for "possession and buying only" or selling un-violence tainted pot (i.e. Holland seeds). So, assuming every "other/unspecified", immigrant, and drug inmate should be set free (even the drug lords) gives an unrealistic upper bound of 355,256 who don't deserve to be there (all the others seem deserved to me). Assuming only the immigrants and 55,013 state "possessers only" an unrealistic lower bound of 78,713. So the amount of American prisoners who shouldn't be there is only somewhere between 5-23 percent, I'd guess about 14. What did misplaced liberal sympathy really cause you to think our backwards safety net and drug laws cause an overwhelming % of the inmates?

As a further help to my position, the police here touch you about 12 times a year if you're young, black, male and live in a high crime area (only with the back of the hand though). They often find drugs. But they also attempt to buy drugs. If he falls for it, they arrest the drug dealer (after multiple buys). And the dealer is in many more sales than the user, and has to be in the street with drugs for hours while the addict goes home. So he is more likely to get caught. Also, when drug dealers get incarcerated, desperately poor men looking to get rich take their place, planting a new crop of deserving drug prisoner. The only limit is running out of ballsy people with sufficiently low empathy. That's never happened.

Even more no one is in state prison for an event that happens in more than one state (say, selling drugs online), and I guess the federal drug police is more likely to arrest big producers/dealers/importers than people who only buy and use, so the percentage of federal drug inmates who are just users is probably lower. What, did misplaced liberal sympathy really cause you to think that our backwards safety net and drug laws cause a huge percent of inmates? Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:30, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I personally have no sympathy for guilty prisoners. (except victimless crimes) There's emergency rush food stamp application processing, no ID needed, just your fingerprint to prevent milking the people, and no immigration checks). And homeless shelters that try to find you a job. It's not like you're going to starve to death in America if you don't rob someone. Most criminals know that the amount of suffering they cause is more than the amount to how much suffering they feel, often way/outrageously out of proportion, enough to be called intraspecies predators and/or parasites and thus human garbage. I really doubt all those who defraud every day and make mothers cry are so sensitive they would literally cry all their life if they had to work, for example. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:30, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I did consider (most of) what you said. Rather than get into it, I surrender, retaining my distrust of statisticians. Perhaps if we'd met on YouTube, we'd have had an epic chat. But somebody's trying to learn the other thing here. InedibleHulk (talk) 05:49, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

Are you including the citizenry of North Korea in that count? There, pretty much the entire nation is incarcerated. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:53, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As for the effectiveness of long prison terms, it does seem to work in one respect, "removal from society". That is, while incarcerated, most criminals are unable to commit crimes on society outside the jail. They can, of course, still attack each other and the guards, and could theoretically commit wire fraud, but there are protections against that. A drug kingpin could also arrange killings and such from behind bars. But, your average house thief won't be breaking into any homes while incarcerated. StuRat (talk) 21:22, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sure the Aztecs before us could give many an explanation for how their sacrifices made the Sun rise each day. Much the same thing, for the same reasons, by people thinking the same way. Perhaps the same things will end it. Wnt (talk) 22:02, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The one theory has nothing to do with the other. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:08, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'll admit, I'm not an expert on the ancient Aztecs ... but I bet that a lot of their ideas about the merits of forced sacrifice and the sort of smug satisfaction in imposing it on the lower races would seem very familiar to American judicial tradition. Prison is ultimately a religion - it doesn't teach anything, doesn't do anything, costs a fortune, we know full well other countries do without it, but nobody cares, because it's some kind of divine moral duty to inflict pain on people. Wnt (talk) 22:17, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I should add that the OP's suggestion sort of plays into this - its something done to those people from those neighborhoods for their "own good", in the futile expectation that teaching kids to expect prison as normal for their class - and race - won't inure them to the idea. Meanwhile, no government has the money to offer basic support to the hookers they find on the street, or immediate access to drug rehabilitation, or to offer equal (let alone better) patrols for the poor neighborhoods as for the wealthy; but they can afford to put people who sell "look alike substances" in jail so that you can count on your right to drive into a slum where you've never been before and probably the person selling you dope is selling the real thing. Not to mention, of course, the broader range of funds to keep the drugs illegal and the neighborhoods run by gangs in general. Nobody really cares about what those people have to deal with - they care about their own crooked bottom line, their employment in the industries that the present system creates, and keeping their own neighborhood nice. So it's like any cruel pagan rite, all unreasoning belief in magic around a rotten core of privilege and deception. Wnt (talk) 22:24, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

1. doesn't teach anything: Teaches them exactly how inconvenient or not society's punishment for their crimes (convicted or not) feels like to them personally, an amount you philosophically have to experience to be sure. (they already know how good the crimes made them feel). Then they can compare. While useful lessons in themselves (most rookie criminals estimate this balance to their favor) Hopefully it's not worth it enough to dissuade them completely. Also teaches them what their victims felt. 2. doesn't do anything: Keeps them from fucking raping your child 3. we know full well other countries do without it: No countries have 0 prisons. Maybe Vatican City. I'm sure you mean macrostates. I'm being called out for inaccuracies that look like 2<4 compared to how ridiculous that statement is. Also, America has the highest crime rate of any industrialized country so other countries can do with less. 4. it's some kind of divine moral duty to inflict pain on people: who being the most stoic humans would otherwise would have no incentive to not inflict pain first, nor way to stop them. I once read that it is impossible to punish a psychopath. They only be punished by pain in the present. He would defraud again the second it stopped hurting bad. (Only if he thinks he won't get caught.) (Their motto) (And mantra). Also, they have very high pain tolerance. I read a book by a poker cheat. "What to do if you get caught" starts with "It is very hard to beat a man to death, only six men can geometrically beat you up at the same time and it takes ten minutes. Scream, beg, exaggerate, do anything to get them to stop, if there is blood, let them see it" and then says that a beating means you haven't practiced your cheating enough, how to know when it's about to happen, throw anything behind you when you run away, say that you'll call the police cause beatings are punished more than fraud, how to position your car to escape fastest, and abandon property in view (buy fake car keys) to try to get them to think you're not escaping.

5. patrols: Bear with me: I spent 2013 where I didn't want to go outside without sun at first and ended up sliding to 45,50 minutes after sunset. Otherwise, I got off at the part of the train that allowed me to stay in a stream of people all the way to the lobby and didn't even do this after 10. At first, the lobby lock was a decades old magnet so huge it looked like it could stop a car. The public areas are almost 100% covered by cameras. A man was murdered 150 feet from my bed only 7 years before. There are When I bought a TV, I held it such that the only ways to grab and run were forcing 8 fingers open or pulling it out the side. An average build man assertively/no nonsense grabbed my TV (still sealed) without hesitation, did a uniform rather hard pulling force for half a flight of stairs while repeating "packajay" (like I'm supposed to know what that means), before making a sigh of exasperation and giving up. (I don't get it, if he turned his back to run up (weighed down by 16 lb, no less), I would've lunged and grabbed his ankles. The faster he was, the harder he would slam to the stairs from momentum, giving me enough time to give a punch to his balls then a kick to be sure, regained my entire non-computer wealth and moved out. Maybe he wanted a dollar to porter for the skinny Asian?) Someone across the courtyard tossed his trash up to 20 pounds at a time from very high windows. Then he got even lazier. As soon as I heard a second of "bag air resistance sounds" I thought "OMG, even the wind will be loud. This one's gonna be big." BOOM! (He had found larger bags and stuffed the to I would guess 40 pounds) Bottles from that height sound like pistols followed by 0.2-0.3 seconds of glass sounds. Landlord stopped this cause he had to pick up hundreds of pounds of "garbage explosion fields" and finely broken glass. (But not the person who poured fluid out the window every night). The moderately small supermarket had plainclothes security and wouldn't let you in without holding your bags. Because too many people would steal. This made the prices higher.

Okay, Brownsville would make this look nice, (Look here in Google SV.. depressing), but that's a poor neighborhood, right? However, if I walked a mile (round trip) I usually saw two (occupied) police cars. Sometimes one. Once I saw three, (but only cause 1 stayed still). This was the only place I ever saw a police van. The only time I attempted to be out after 10, I ran to a garbage can 125 feet away at 1:30 Saturday night constantly looking for persons exiting and was going to abort if I saw a human. In those 0.4 minutes of observation I saw a police armored truck that looked straight out of Iraq. The lights reminded me of this

, the windows looked.. military, bulletproof. (small, rectangular, and thick as hell). It looked almost like a police tank. That's alot stronger patrolling than the poorest law-abiding newer immigrant neighborhoods in Queens, a deimmigranting gentrifying one like Astoria, the upper middle class Upper West Side, or the rich Upper East Side. They put the polices where they are needed. In the 90s they doubled the police in the exploding garbage neighborhood, purged many crooked cops, and overhauled their strategy. As a result, I didn't see crack selling where it used to be easy and murdering is down like 80%. And as police nationwide like to copy the NYPD's success they might patrol the poor near you, too.

Remember my slave comment? The worst immigrant neighborhoods are made of people descended from slaves. The room broker the room broker with a share of a business has to put toilet paper in a garbage bin because it clogs her toilet. So did my second place there. (the shit survives two flushes) Her landlord never fixes it or she doesn't ask. She doesn't mind. And they're only partly descended from slaves. (The only country founded by a slave master massacre is almost 100% former slaves and is the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, though probably richer than the slaves were) Worst than that are people descended from U.S. slaves. At least immigrants are not a random sample of their country (though some are illegal or evaded conviction at home, the government won't allow persons of bad moral character to immigrate. G-d, you have to jump through so much hoops to come here legally, I think many criminals would give up). The poorest safe neighborhoods are made of new school immigrants not descended from slaves. (old school=Italian, Irish..) I never felt unsafe walking at 3am there. This is why America has so much crime, their former slaves have to spend when a brain is deplasticizing in a slum with no father, a slutty mother and beatings from her thuggish boyfriends and/or own mother, making them hate women. All this crap reduces empathy or makes them sadists/masochists/sadomasochists depending on genes. It seems reasonable that many others would be traumatized (I don't know) but no one seems to talk about that. (Maybe I can't get past my post-5 year old brain paradigm of what would happen). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:30, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Back to the original question - an educational charity in the UK called The No Way Trust organises some limited prison visits for children over 13,[9] so the idea is not unprecedented. Alansplodge (talk) 22:46, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems if it can be made possibly reasonable regarding psychological consequences it's because of the particularity of Uk schools (School uniforms in England). --Askedonty (talk) 09:20, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This question is an example of something teachers aren't fans of. Society has a problem it didn't used to have. Families are dysfunctional. Let's ask the schools to fix it. But what do we want the schools to spend less time on? Mathematics? HiLo48 (talk) 09:27, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, math isn't redundant to four or five entire TV channels. Get rid of American history, and everything else on the Discovery network. Nobody needs to know who Thomas Jefferson was. That's hobby info, like knowing how nautiluses work. Got your whole life to learn that, no rush. If they still teach animals in school, scratch that, too. Discovery's got you covered, even in prison. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:27, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

1. What's wrong with giving people a variety of enriching experiences, from the personal interests of a variety of people, that they might never have again? You can never get the childhood wonder again. There is just so much stuff I'm glad I saw that I never would've known or even cared about if they didn't insist on showing it to me. 2. Two times more math will not teach them math twice as fast, or do you want less school to balance? 3. An educated populace is a more informed populace. They teach history because they don't want it to repeat itself and they want them to be able to recognize parallels with the events and politicians of the next 50-70 years (after that they'll be dead). Do they teach NHL trivia in Canada? Also, you get all the more important trivia like who Thomas Jefferson was out of the way early so that you can move on to more obscure trivia like what's a Sasquatch, what the Halifax explosion was and what's a Tridentine Mass. You learn the islands of the world starting from the biggest until you know Flores, and can point out Tambora on a line drawing of coastlines. Learn the water bodies in order until the Bay of Bohai does not feel obscure anymore and you can name it's bays. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 17:34, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't want more math, just thought it would be better gone than history, since they don't teach math on TV. A bit too much of that in school already, too, but kids need the basics. "They" thrive on history repeating itself, and teaching it to hasn't stopped the prisons filling up. We need more (good) music. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:53, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

More music, good idea. The point of music is to improve their taste and creativeness right? I've listened to a lot of Youtube. So I would have things like (the commonest Beethoven most can't name), Vivaldi masterpiece, I just Died In Your Arms Tonight remix, Good for tweens, 60s-like innovation, to expand their mind beyond rap. (If they're too "gangster" for that try more intelligent hardness like this: hard part starts at 0:55) Listen to three minutes of the third one if nothing else. All have new parts till like 50-90%. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 10:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Saying that this sort of program would lower crime rates assumes that the reason people commit crimes is because they aren't aware that prison sucks. You mention a "reputation of broken families leading to a cycle of youth pregnancy, gangs, narcotic abuse," and it seems to make a lot more sense to tackle those problems directly. Katie R (talk) 12:35, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, right after posting I realized this was more of a debate/discussion type of response... Feel free to hat this, especially if it triggers more of a debate that doesn't really answer the question. Katie R (talk) 12:37, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine that when a 250lb rapist is aroused by your 8th grade male butt (yech!) and "makes it impossible to not know" that's gotta make a normal person say I'm never going to live here. But if the studies show it increases crime then they're righter than me. (Maybe by tightening what seems realistic away from the good and bad ends?) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 10:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Anyone have access to the following Italian source?

I don't know if this is the correct place to ask this, but here it goes. Does anyone have access to the following Italian source?

Zamagni, V (ed), Come Pedere la Pace e Vincere la Guerra, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1997

An editor (developing a reputation for fabrication, plagiarism, and misusing sources) has input information into an article from this source, but refuses to provide any additional information or verify what exactly has been said. From what I can make out, as I do not speak Italian and was only able to find the intro online, the book is a collection of six essays each from different authors.

The editor claims that on page 53, one of the historians states "Italy's limited incursion into south-eastern France had been, despite initial setbacks, relatively successful from a military, strategic and political point of view." (pulled from the article, so I do not know if it was a direct quote from the book).

If anyone has access to this source, can they please clarify:

If the above was stated on page 53
If so, why (what is the greater context)
Which of the six historians actually stated the above

Thanks for your timeEnigmaMcmxc (talk) 11:12, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Resource exchange might be a good place to ask. --ColinFine (talk) 11:05, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much Colin, I will try there.EnigmaMcmxc (talk) 21:15, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The references state that the first article in the collection, Un’analisi macroeconomica degli effetti della guerra, by V. Zamagni, is on pp 13-54. --Pp.paul.4 (talk) 05:57, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

UK Base rate vs lending rates

Hi there, I am trying to find historical information on banks' (mortgage) lending rates vs the base rate. For instance if the base rate rises up to 2-3% I am interested in what kind of lending the banks will offer based on old data. I am also interested in anecdotal evidence from anyone (obviously knowing this does not constitute advice in any way) Thanks 82.17.99.92 (talk) 12:09, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of links with what I think you are looking for, the first one has a nice graph too. Base rates and bank interest rates, Graphs > UK Interest Rates - HousePriceCrash.co.uk. DuncanHill (talk) 15:42, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Venetian ceremonial galley of the 1700s

I've been working on galley for quite a while and I've looked a lot at images of the bucentaur. In many paintings in from the 1700s, there is a very large, bright-red galley moored bow first in front of the Molo on Saint Mark's Square. It's on paintings from the 1730s up to the 1780s and is always depicted covered (as though not unused at the time). In seems to be the same vessel in each of the paintings, or at least the same design. Here are the paintings:

Considering it's size and position, it's obviously not a normal war galley or anything like that, but rather a vessel of official improtance. Does anyone know the identity of this particular galley?

Peter ^Isotalo 13:23, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Who was David Murdoch referenced on page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier#Prostitution

On the above page there was a quote attributed to "David Murdoch" and I am curious who he is / was. The quote: "No other nation has taken a time and place from its past and produced a construct of the imagination equal to America's creation of the West". Again, the source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_frontier#Prostitution 71.57.135.253 (talk) 18:33, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

David Hamilton Murdoch, who Amazon identifies as "Principal Teaching Fellow in the School of History at the University of Leeds". The book was published in 2001; a search of Leeds' website suggests he no longer works there. -- Finlay McWalterᚠTalk 19:18, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I was about to answer this with: "Well, David Murdoch is just this guy, you know?" :>) Blueboar (talk) 20:22, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

He was born 1937, which suggests probably now retired: VIAF. Publications seem to be heavily about American history, and that book in particular seems to have been well-regarded. Andrew Gray (talk) 13:26, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Female United States Navy SEALs

Am I correct in reading that only males are eligible to be in the United States Navy SEALs? That's what it says in United States Navy SEAL selection and training. If that's the case, how does the federal government get around the discrimination laws against females? Has this situation ever arisen (i.e., a female contesting this rule), or not as of yet? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 22:57, 10 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I googled "why are navy seals only men", and it came up with a Navy FAQ[10] which says that it's a legal restriction. And if you check out some of the additional references, you'll find justifications along with the fact that it's under discussion. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:17, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. What "additional references" are you referring to? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:54, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The references you can see when you google "why are navy seals only men". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:01, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, OK. You mean the other "hits" that come up in that Google search. I thought you meant that there were references in that Navy FAQ article; and I did not see any there. Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:02, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, that's what I meant. You get a reasonable cross-section of opinions on the matter. The bottom line seems to be that the nature of the SEALs is not conducive to having women in the mix. And one site pointed out that at least 99.9 percent of American men aren't qualified to be SEALs either. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:38, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know if there has ever been an actual case of a woman challenging the regulation... but for what it's worth, there has been a fictional account (See: G.I. Jane). Blueboar (talk) 13:46, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The question would come down to whether there's a constitutional right to be a SEAL, or at least to try out for the job. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:23, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Congress has the constitutional authority “To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, clause 14. Capitalismojo (talk) 15:39, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a good overview of the issue from the Congressional Research Service. Capitalismojo (talk) 15:41, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The British are debating at this very time; weather or not to allow women to do combat.[11] And why not? I'll stay a block or two away from the wife when she is waving her rolling pin at me. Forget John Wayne and The Green Berets (film). Had she been 20 years older and sent to Vietnam, she would have soon had Hồ Chí Minh begging for forgiveness and promising to buy her a new evening gown. During the Second World War, some of the most fearsome Italian and French resistance operatives were female. So don't think that a woman can't do what a mans got to do (as John Wayne liked to say every time he just got shot in the shoulder and said ah, it just a scratch) (why did he not get shot any were else?).--Aspro (talk) 23:44, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Going into combat is one thing, being a SEAL is another. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:05, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is your point?--Aspro (talk) 21:18, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

SEALs are "Special Operations" and many times complete missions that are not 'public record', the SEALS were created with the intent that the President may if he/she wishes disavow them as US military personnel, not to mention deny that any mission or even the SEALs themselves on that mission even exist. SEALs unlike "combat troops" aren't designed have a planned and co-ordinated backup/support/reinforcement force, they may very well be left on the battlefield without even an official claim by Washington.^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 06:14, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Honestly? Is all of that true? Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:59, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That was the original intent, and since many missions are beyond classified one has to ask why?^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 18:47, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Baseball Bugs' "point", such as it is, is that women may be OK as regular combat troops but they are too weak, too indecisive, too damn female to cut it as Navy SEALs. --Viennese Waltz 15:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:01, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 11

Battle of Berlin footage

In this video [12], at 35-36 seconds, a Soviet troop is seen firing a canon while another soviet troop is falling on the ground probably because of absorbing the blast. Is it the case? And how a soldier can fire in such a way that cause freindly fire? --EditorMakingEdits (talk) 06:42, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That does seem to be the case. We don't see if the soldier gets up again afterwards or if he was seriously injured. The Soviets were well known for their callousness to their own troops, machine gunning those who retreated without orders, see barrier troops and Shtrafbat. This seems to be just carelessness however. Alansplodge (talk) 09:51, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If you pass close in front of the muzzle of a gun that size when it's fired the shockwave can easily knock you over and stun you so it can take several minutes before you recover. If you're really unlucky the burning waste propellant can set you afire. John C Kay (talk) 02:32, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wikpedia errors becoming an Internet meme: Peter Katin

Is s there a phrase for cases where an error in Wikipedia has ended up being treated as authoritative and widely quoted, with or without attribution? The pianist Peter Katin was educated, as our article now says, based on a published source, was educated at private schools in Balham, Caterham, East Grinstead and Clapham. Up to 17 December 2009 the article said nothing about his schooling but on that date an anonymous editor altered the article to read "He attended Whitgift School in South Croydon..." No reference was given for this change. On Googling for Peter Katin, one finds a number of websites that state that he was educuated at Whitgift, but on examination they nearly all seem to be word for word copies of our article. One of these websites was in turn used as the reference when Peter Katin was added to the list in the "Notable Alumni" section of our Whitgift School article. This list then seems in turn to have been copied lock stock and barrel to the list at Old Whitgiftians website which many people would no doubt consider to be authoritative. I wonder, does this happen often? --rossb (talk) 10:24, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can't say how often it happens, but it's often enough to have been referenced in popular culture. See also Reliability of Wikipedia#Information loop. Sjö (talk) 10:28, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

xkcd is popular? Darn, do I have to stop reading it? —Tamfang (talk) 08:48, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It happens often enough that we have had to specifically address the issue in our WP:Verifiability policy (see WP:CIRCULAR). What I would like to find out is how long it takes for a correction to a Wikipedia article to make it onto the internet. Blueboar (talk) 13:34, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

His web site is down but I found a Wayback Machine snapshot, that has a contact page with an email address. Maybe someone could write to it and ask whether he went to Whitgift. Regarding Wikipedia's error rate for this type of info, Roy Rosenzweig examined Wikipedia biographies in 2005[13] and found that while not error-free, they were more accurate than the commercial Encarta encyclopedia, and a Nature assessment of WP science articles found their accuracy comparable to Encyclopedia Britannica. That always seemed like a good target level to me. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 22:37, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As it happens I'm acquainted with Peter Katin and asked him about this. He e-mailed back and said "So far I've failed to convince Wikipedia that I had nothing to do with Whitgift School! I suppose the major one was Henry Thornton, then known as the South West London Emergency Secondary School, through the forties." (Henry Thornton School is in Clapham.) I mentioned this on Talk:Peter Katin but I imagine it might be classed as Original Research, so have not referenced this on the article itself. --rossb (talk) 22:58, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see. Yeah, just taking out the info and putting a clarification on the talk page handles the Whitgift issue. WP:FEFS has some more guidance if Peter Katin wants to ask for other corrections or changes. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 00:16, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ray Kassar

After being accused of insider trading, Ray Kassar settled a case with the relevant government agency, "returning his profits without acknowledging guilt or innocence" according to the article. How/to whom would one return profits? One could figure out who'd bought the shares from him, but since the sale would have a ripple effect, lots of people would have experienced some result of Kassar's sale, and one couldn't return profits to all of them. Alternately, I can imagine him being required to pay the profits as a fine, but that wouldn't exactly be "returning". Nyttend (talk) 14:12, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

He disgorged his profits into a government settlement fund as a fine. The link is to the legal documents. Capitalismojo (talk) 15:56, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

From the SEC boilerplate of such funds: "To receive money from such a settlement fund you make a claim against the fund. To be potentially eligible to participate in the SEC Fund, claimants must submit a completed Proof of Claim Form. Investors whose claims are deemed eligible claimants with so long as those approved transactions calculate to an Eligible Loss under the Plan of Allocation for the SEC Fund. If you are a custodian, trustee or professional investing and claiming on behalf of more than one potentially eligible claimant in a pooled investment fund or entity, you will be required to complete a certification attesting that any distribution you receive will be allocated for the benefit of current or former investors and not for the benefit of management. " Capitalismojo (talk) 16:00, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you; I didn't even know where to start looking. Do you know where you could find a secondary source about this? I'd like to modify the article, but I'm loth to use the legal documents, and Google's returning nothing useful. Nyttend (talk) 19:16, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Glad to help. There's a book Atari, Inc: Business is Fun that talks a little bit about this. I'm not sure its what you need, though. Capitalismojo (talk) 19:35, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Belligerents' diplomacy during WWII

I imagine there must have been some communication links between the Allies and the Axis belligerent nations during WWII no matter how frosty and hostile. But how were they conducted and by whom? And what if the messages were not to the recipients' liking? Was the intermediary in danger of himself being regarded as hostile or partisan? 94.174.140.161 (talk) 16:18, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe this kind of thing is typically conducted by diplomats of each side, meeting in neutral territory. See Switzerland during the World Wars; it was probably more relevant during the First than during the Second, because both sides had borders with Switzerland throughout World War I, but it was surrounded by Axis territory during World War II — however, it would have been useful/relevant before France was conquered. The concept of a protecting power may also be relevant: here Country A takes care of Country B's negotiations with Country C. Nyttend (talk) 19:23, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, I failed to read that article myself; note that it has an entire section on Switzerland. I get the impression that it would work as follows:

Mussolini needs to negotiate something with Roosevelt
Mussolini calls up the Swiss Embassy in Rome and gives them a message
Message is sent to Bern, which sends it to Washington
Swiss Embassy in Washington contacts US State Department and gives them the message
US State Department receives message and responds in the same manner

Note that Country A can represent Country B in Country C without representing Country C in Country B, but it's entirely possible that Switzerland could have helpe dboth sides this way. Nyttend (talk) 19:30, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You can see examples of this in the first few notes transcribed here. The first note is from Max Grässli, a Swiss diplomat, to the U.S. Secretary of State, relaying a message from the Japanese government. The next two notes are from the U.S. Secretary of State to Max Grässli, replying to the Japanese government.--Cam (talk) 20:36, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is a scene in the 1969 film Battle of Britain in which Baron von Richter (played by Curd Jürgens and apparently a fictionalised portrayal of Joachim von Ribbentrop) pays a visit to the British Embassy in Switzerland, where Sir David Kelly (played by Ralph Richardson), provides a nice cup of tea while von Richter delivers Hitler's terms for Britain's surrender. Whether such a meeting actually took place, I don't know. Alansplodge (talk) 00:32, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Forty Martyrs

I passed a Forty Martyrs church yesterday in Tuscola, Illinois, your typical rural county seat in the midwestern USA. The cornerstone bears the current name of the church, together with a date of 1925. At this time, were churches being dedicated to the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales yet? I see that the martyrs were canonised decades later, but I suppose that there could have been a popular conception of forty martyrs even without official recognition or an official definition of who was included. The only alternative is the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, killed in 320; they seem to be celebrated more in the Orthodox Church, not in the local Catholic parish for a typical Midwestern town (their website gives no indication of being Eastern Rite, for example), and these small-town churches definitely tend to be dedicated to well-known saints or (occasionally) recently canonised ones, rather than a group from 1600 years earlier who are very little known, at least in the West. Nyttend (talk) 21:26, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oops, never mind; I just discovered this document (see page 2) while looking for information on something else. Apparently they did dedicate it to the ancient martyrs. Nyttend (talk) 21:40, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Only forty? In London, we ~~have~~ had a church dedicated to St. Mary, St. Ursula and her 11,000 Virgins. Apparently, Saint Ursula and her 11,000 handmaidens all had their heads chopped off by those wicked Germans. A church in Cologne marks the spot. Alansplodge (talk) 00:40, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Holy hell, the spot's marked alright. I like how the article calls them "former occupants". InedibleHulk (talk) 11:18, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

What does Poltergeist III have to do with St Ursula? Did you make a copy/paste error? Nyttend (talk) 11:52, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, I was implying digging up all those corpses and using them for decoration may anger a spirit or two. But I'm no theologian. Maybe God's into this sort of whimsy. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:58, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

Making weird decorations from other folks' bones is acceptable in some European cultures, see the Sedlec Ossuary and Santa Maria della Concezione. We Britons did away with that sort of thing at the Reformation and it seems a bit odd or even repulsive to us. A more recent example is the Douaumont Ossuary where you can peer into windows at the bones of those who were dismembered during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. Alansplodge (talk) 13:04, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Medieval theologians decided that you only needed your skull and thigh bones to be resurrected on Judgement Day - hence the skull and crossbones motif. Being interred close to holy relics was believed to hasten your entry into the celestial gates on the last day, so there were funerary guilds (which we don't seem have an article about) that you could join and your subscriptions would buy your bones a place in the guild's charnel house and the services of a priest to say Requiem Masses for your soul while you did your time in purgatory. So for medieval Catholics at least, having your bones made into interior décor was quite a desirable objective. Alansplodge (talk) 17:34, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well. No harm, no foul, then. At least by Medieval European human standards. It does seem they're still the authority on Church matters. For what it's worth, I have a British queen, and personally don't have a problem with it. Corpses aren't people anymore. Just figured with all the reverence attached to "proper Christian burial", the designer may have sinned, somehow. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:03, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

Apparently, funeral guilds still exist. And here I thought there were only two acolytes left. (On that note, these guys are certainly not winning any St. Peter points.) InedibleHulk (talk) 23:19, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

Ancient Peru

Why did the first American civilization develop in Peru? What special conditions (climate, geography, etc) explain its development?--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 22:42, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To answer your question, you'll want to start at the Wikipedia article titled Norte Chico civilization and then follow links from there to more in-depth scholarly studies. --Jayron32 22:58, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is the real per capita income of the USA?

I'm doing some research, and there seem to be different figures for the per capita income in the USA:

The 13.7 trillion here would make personal income about $43,217 per capita for a population of 317 million. The figure is confirmed here.

However, the figure here is $28,051[14].

Can someone tell me why the figures are different?

It's easy to get median income for "families" but I'm looking for per capita average income of every man woman and child in the USA. I'm not sure where to get authoritative figures. B^e——C_ritical 23:04, 11 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm guessing that your answer and the Census Bureau's answers are both right, and the difference is that you and they are measuring different things. You've calculated the mean income, but Census Bureau financial demographics generally seem to pay attention to median income; see median and arithmetic mean if you're unclear what I mean. If one person earns $1,100,000,000 annually, and ten people earn $10, $9, $8, etc. annually, the mean income is going to be $100,000,005, but the median income is going to be $6. Nyttend (talk) 01:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think I get it... tell me if I'm right: the CB is calculating the per capita median income, not the per capita income? And this is different from the usual median income we hear about of about $52,000 because it's for individuals. Half of individuals have income less than $28,000 and half have more? B^e——C_ritical 02:31, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean, either. Tons of people (most children, lots of elderly, prisoners, etc.) don't work and have no income. Are they counted toward the median? Or does the median only track people with a non-zero income? As far as the CB is calculating the per capita median income, not the per capita income, not quite: they're tracking one definition of the per capita income, and you're tracking another. Nyttend (talk) 02:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Right, well, as long as I'm not going to be wrong if I just divide the total income by the population (: It does seem to me that the figures are recited without explanation, but that the per capita average income is much more revealing than the median figures. And in fact the median figures seem misleading to the average reader. I know they were for me. When you hear about the median income you get an impression of how rich the country is that is far lower than the reality. Thanks for your help! B^e——C_ritical 14:11, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A competent economist would be extremely unlikely to use the mean in this case, because (contrary to your understanding) the mean is more misleading than the median. This is because income is distributed in a highly skewed way: changes in the very small number of very high values have a misleadingly high effect on changes in the mean, but not in the median. For more details, see our article on the median. RomanSpa (talk) 09:32, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I understand that, and that's why the mean is so much more revealing: the median makes it look as if the society can't afford stuff, whereas the mean shows us just how rich the society is, and how relatively poor most people are. Any competent economist would be at pains to make this apparent. B^e——C_ritical 14:10, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We do, but there are better ways to do it. The problem with citing a mean is that it doesn't come close to describing what life is like for most people. Certainly there are weaknesses to using a median, but because of the skewed nature of the income distribution there are more people whose income is "close" to the median than there are people whose income is "close" to the mean. (You'll notice that I've avoided defining "close", because there's a complicated debate about how we define this term, but it doesn't matter for this discussion. If you're not already convinced, visual inspection of the distribution should prove suggestive.) The purpose of a good statistic is to communicate something clearly to the audience as simply as possible, and the median does this. That is, we can say "people's median income is X", and more people will think to themselves "yes, on the basis of my own income and those of the people I know that sounds about right". However, if we say "people's mean (or average) income is Y" we end up with a lot of people thinking "no, that doesn't sound right, based on me and people I know", and then we have to engage in a complicated discussion about income inequality and quantiles, and we end up having to explain medians to people anyway. Along the way we lose a lot of our audience because their numeracy is poor. Your approach might have rhetorical advantages if you're speaking to a numerate audience, but it's not generally useful. '"people's median income is X", and more people will think to themselves "yes, on the basis of my own income and those of the people I know that sounds about right".'

There's an additional complication: your contention that "the mean shows us just how rich society is" is wrong. Suppose there is a new public works project available to the USA that costs about $110 billion. Looking at it from an "average" point of view, we see that it would cost each citizen about $345. For many people this is a substantial sum, and it would be difficult to get consensus to spend this money. Yet Congress routinely spends many multiples of this with the ready assent of the electorate (Medicare and Medicaid together cost eight times as much), because of the differential tax contributions to the national budget of different income groups, not to mention the many other sources of revenue that can be used for spending purposes (e.g. corporation taxes). To use a simple average in such a situation is a severe over-simplification, and does not helpfully describe what actually happens when spending decisions are made, which is why we generally don't describe things in this way. The mean does not show us how rich society is, because it turns out that society is not full of average people, but is a complex interplay of different contributions and costs. RomanSpa (talk) 15:25, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, the public works project I mentioned is an "Apollo Moonshot Program": although there were certainly some people who moaned about the price of Apollo at the time (I've adjusted everything to current prices, more or less) it was a straightforward job to get agreement to pay for it (at least compared to the current intransigence of the usual suspects). RomanSpa (talk) 15:25, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"The problem with citing a mean is that it doesn't come close to describing what life is like for most people." Yes, I'm sure the Gini coefficient is better in some ways, but the fact that the mean describes something totally outside most people's experience is its strong point, not its weak point. "there are more people whose income is "close" to the median than there are people whose income is "close" to the mean." Yes, so we describe a nation that is "like most people's experience" so the inequality is hidden by numbers. "The purpose of a good statistic is to communicate something clearly to the audience as simply as possible, and the median does this." It communicates something false to most people: that their income is close to the average. People don't know what "median" means. "'"people's median income is X", and more people will think to themselves "yes, on the basis of my own income and those of the people I know that sounds about right".'" WTF kind of knowledge is that? It's called FALSE. " Looking at it from an "average" point of view, we see that it would cost each citizen about $345. For many people this is a substantial sum, and it would be difficult to get consensus to spend this money." Depending on just how progressive the tax system is, you're right, but putting it in terms of a percentage of an average per capita income would be less misleading. This is a situation where the median would be better. B^e——C_ritical 16:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I believe I remarked above that "I've avoided defining "close", because there's a complicated debate about how we define this term", which is why I tried to couch my discussion in rather lax terms, precisely because I didn't want to get into the philosophical and economic complexities. As you say: "WTF kind of knowledge is that? It's called FALSE." Well, up to a point. You may wish to consider truth in economics as described by a Coherence theory of truth, and attempt to reconcile this with the reasoning that guides Constructivist epistemology: that's roughly where the current thinking is. I think we're generally very unwise to blindly adopt a correspondence-theoretic approach to truth in economics, for the obvious reason that there's no independent test for the truth of any statement (that is, we can check the statement "the sky is blue" by looking at the sky, but we can't in reality do the same sort of thing with a statement like "median income is X", because we do not have a direct apprehension of median income). My aim was to explain a difficult idea in a simple way, and in general terms my comments seem broadly valid. If you have a better way of describing how economic actors perceive the environment in which they act you've probably got a good chance of getting a nice paper out of it. RomanSpa (talk) 17:45, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're talking about truth as a fuzzy and relative concept not an absolute, and I definitely agree with that. But that doesn't mean that there's no truth or falsehood either. Maybe median income is a good way of stating things in a world where it communicates a correct truth range (a general impression that could be said to be generally accurate). This might have been fine up till the 70s or 80s when productivity gains were being more fairly distributed. But right now in the current context it practically makes one want to formulate a conspiracy theory. Median income is as you say what the average man will think the average person makes, and in the current context this is far enough outside any reasonable idea of accuracy that it constitutes a lie. Don't you think? B^e——C_ritical 19:04, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

To show this, you would use the total wealth of the nation, and some measure of how unevenly divided that wealth is. Those two together show that the rich are, or aren't, contributing a reasonable amount. In particular, if wealth and income inequality are both going up, then more progressive taxes are needed to prevent that nation from becoming an oligarchy. StuRat (talk) 14:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I was well aware of income disparity, but still knowing the average income was eye-opening in that it shows that we can well afford many things that we are told we cannot afford. I believe the average tax rate is about 23%, which for an average family earning $170,000 or a single person earning $42,000 is very affordable and could be raised. Thus knowing the average shows that there is no lack of money. B^e——C_ritical 16:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Careful here. If a flat tax rate of 23% were implemented, that would be a disaster, as a good portion of the lower income people would be unable to pay it, and those with higher incomes would pay even less than they do now, both resulting in less income for the government. This is why a progressive tax rate is critical, if the government is to be properly funded. StuRat (talk) 18:20, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes a flat tax would be a disaster, but it is revealing that a average tax rate of 23% in the context of an average income of $170,000 for a family of 4 leaves very ample room to raise taxes. We could almost double tax revenues in a progressive tax system. B^e——C_ritical 18:53, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

[outdent] Median household income last year was about $52,000. [15] I don't know where you are finding the $170,000 figure. That is probably above the 90th percentile. With an average of 2.6 people per household [16], that works out to a median of $20,000 per household member. Marco polo (talk) 19:48, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

HAHA, TO RomanSpa, You see what I mean? Marco polo, the average income is the total income divided by the population. You think it's the 90th percentile because if income were equally divided, everyone would be in the 90th percentile (if you're correct). B^e——C_ritical 20:16, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

$170,000 may be the mean income. That it is so much higher than the median says a lot about income disparity in the United States. Obviously if income were equally divided, everyone would not be in the 90th percentile or 10th deciles; percentiles and deciles would be meaningless as terms of comparison. Anyway, it is mistaken to pretend that tax policy can be based on $170,000 "average" incomes when few taxpayers have incomes near that. Marco polo (talk) 23:13, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The mean income would be very useful for calculating taxes, as it gives a basis for creating a progressive tax structure. If you didn't know the mean, you wouldn't know how high to set the tax rates for those with income lower and higher than the average, in order to produce a more equitable society and stimulate the economy maximally. So taxes can indeed be based on the average income because the average income is properly speaking the primary reference point. B^e——C_ritical 00:23, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As you've noticed, median and centiles are used in discussing income distribution. It isn't misleading to refer to the median as "average income" because the median is just as much an average as the mean is. See any introductory statistics textbook. If you want to get across to a non-specialist readership what it means you can say that half of households earn more and half earn less. There is absolutely no reason why the mean can't also be calculated and referred to. A "competent economist" will find no problem using both. Itsmejudith (talk) 08:04, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 12

Religions with inferior Creators?

The main ones seem to hinge on the idea that the creator god is bigger, older, wiser and just better than its subordinate creations. Is there one (or more) that holds life as we know it resulted from some tinkering gone awry by simpler creatures (which may or may not have survived), like how humans might be kickstarting fancy robots?

Doesn't have to be a pure "religion". A "school of thought" is fine. But I'm not talking about any sort of natural selection. There has to be intent involved in the creation. Like someone physically, hopefully building the first cell, then adding bits and pieces until the bits and pieces automated and recursively self-improved.

I've looked at List of creation myths, but nothing's popping out at me. Don't want to read them all. Any hints? InedibleHulk (talk) 02:01, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

Your "tinkering" bit makes me think of the origins of the Khazad in Tolkien's legendarium (Aulë doesn't want to wait for the Eruhíni to awake, so he makes his own race, and God ultimately accepts them), so if you're familiar with that story, could you please say whether that's basically what you're looking for? Meanwhile, as far as actual religions, Yaldabaoth seems to fit what you're talking about: this is the name of the Demiurge in some ancient Gnostic variants (see the Pistis Sophia, for example), and in general the Demiurge of Gnosticism sounds like he'd qualify. Nyttend (talk) 02:09, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Never heard of that Tolkien story, but I'll look into it. I don't care for stories where humans are some sort of special life (like in Yaldabaoth]], or the creators are omnipotent/immortal/judgmental (like Sophia). Evolution should still happen as "science" says, but the basics must have been built by a strange, intelligent (by the time's standards) group. I found these "nuts". Has a lot of helpful keywords, so consider this mostly resolved. Answer for others, if you want. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:20, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

I remember reading in my American Lit class some Native American legend about Coyote and some other spirits having to make multiple experiments at making something neat, eventually creating with humanity by just messing about, but heck if I know where the book is. I'm pretty sure it was from the western deserts tribes. The Dionysian Mysteries might have taught that we're the ashes of titans nuked by Zeus after they ate his son Sabazius (who later becomes incarnate as Dionysus). Still special (in that we have the divine spark of Dionysus in us), but still an accident.

Going into the realm of fiction, Lord Dunsany's The Gods of Pegana are almost unaware of humanity (and interactions between the two don't necessarily turn out good for either side). It's been a while since I've read it, but I think they kinda just saw humans and said "where the hell did all these little things come from?" Ian.thomson (talk) 02:25, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I had an Ojibwe step-dad for a bit, and heard quite a bit about Coyote, Raven and Grandmother Moon. Not bad (especially when your brain is melting, but again, humans had their own story. There may have been tales where Starving Eagle looked closely into Water Food which would grow and multiply itself, in new forms each season. But oral history fades and morphs so quickly. Especially when your brain is melting. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:40, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

I'm thinking I might've been reading a Navajo creation story. If not them, one of their neighbors. What I'm finding with a slight glance at the first page of the Google search rings bells, with the creators having to actually make multiple worlds because each one just isn't quite right. Ian.thomson (talk) 02:48, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They all seem to share a the same characters (natural spirits), but the details went all over the place, even from band to band. It's like Tolkienish or Lovecraftian subcultures, but without even a post office, let alone the Internet, for a consensus to take place. They just call it like they see it. Wolves, foxes, salmon, trees, streams: they all project consistent basic attributes, wherever they're seen. Just a matter of brain-melting imagination after that. The good ones get repeated, and the stupid ones go the way of the Jackalope. The Grimm Brothers have a good one on why and how man lives exactly seventy years. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:19, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

The origin of the Khazad (the Dwarves) appears in chapter II of the Quenta Silmarillion, the main part of the Silmarillion. Judging by your comments on Yaldabaoth, I don't think it's what you're trying to find. Nyttend (talk) 02:52, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, but the word "Silmarillion" is probably stuck in my head now, so I might check it out. Thanks. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:19, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

From List of races and species in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "Many races believe that the Universe was created by some sort of god or in the Big Bang. The Jatravartids, however, believe that the Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure. They live in perpetual fear of the time they call "The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief" (their version of the End of the Universe). The theory of the Great Green Arkleseizure is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI." Gandalf61 (talk) 13:40, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Possibly tangential to the original question, but in a number of cosmologies an ignorant, malevolent, or insane demiurge creates our material universe, but is subordinate or subsequent to the true, higher, spiritual G/god. Not sure about the relative power/sophistication dynamics of humans vs. demiurge; mostly what's discussed is that the creator of the material universe is not the true god per se. In some of these cosmologies, humans seek (and are presumably capable of) knowing the higher god, despite being the creation of an entity which did not know God. ☯.Zen Swashbuckler.☠ 15:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Likewise, the robots may figure out the "deep" questions of man (Where did I come from, where am I going?) rather quickly, and get stuck on a much more complicated problem, which they may recognize as the even higher god. To unlock its secrets, they'll try to become it, and also wind up just another demiurge to all-new masters of the universe. As I've come to see by coincidence below, Julian of Norwich may have said as much by It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it; and so everything has its beginning by the love of God.

Thanks for the stories. Not quite there yet, but interesting. And getting closer. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:46, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

The draft

I heard this somewhere. Did it really happen?

Someone wants to get out of the Vietnam War and said something along the lines of I want to kill, kill, kill and drink blood! Thinking that he'll be discharged for craziness. Maybe at an especially inappropriate time to be even more believable like on the bus to the base, maybe just in response to a question by the draft board. And the officer says "You're our man". Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 14:56, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Take a listen to "Alice's Restaurant" --Jayron32 14:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"Alice's Restaurant" is based on actual events, but narrator Arlo Guthrie took some liberties in the telling, so it's possible that part of the story was altered or made up. Full text of the account is here; if you want to look just for the interview with the psychiatrist, you can search for "you're our boy." John M Baker (talk) 17:18, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Supposing the shrink actually did say that, it's entirely possible he was wise to that game. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:32, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A cousin to that would be "The Draft Dodger Rag" by Phil Ochs. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:47, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The joke was that while being a homicidal maniac didn't disqualify him from being drafted, littering was taken far more seriously. StuRat (talk) 18:15, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, and his pointing that contradiction out to them made them change their tune to, "We don't like your kind." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Try a web search for "Uncle Sam Doesn't Need You!" about physicist Richard Feynman and the draft board's psychiatric exam. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 18:18, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Saint related superstitions

In Spain we have a lot of superstitions involving saints; for example St Anthony will only help you if you donate to the poor, Sain Pancras will make you gain money if you put parsley in his image, St Rita will give you one thing but then take away another. And my favorite St Cucufato (who may or may not be Cucuphas) will help you find a lost object if you made knots to a handerckief and pretend you are tying his testicles... Do you have similar sain-realted superstitions or is mainly a Hispanic thing? Do you think a list of supertitions involving saints would be a cute article?90.165.117.1 (talk) 19:21, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Britain St Pancras is believed to make it possible to stand all the way to Sheffield for only the price of a small house. DuncanHill (talk) 23:22, 12 May 2014 (UTC) [reply]

A number of Afro-American religions (such as Santería, Haitian and Louisiana Voodoo, and Espiritismo) include similar invocations of Saints. Hoodoo is related to those traditions, but is more influenced by Protestantism and Pow-Wows, with the Bible taking more of a central focus.

From personal experience, I know a lot of people (even protestants and agnostics) who put a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi in their yard when they wanted to buy or sell a house or other major property. (Although, come to think of it, if they were going to call on St. Francis, why don't they give their house to the poor?) After the purchase is finished, the statue usually ends up being passed on to either a Catholic friend or an ecumenical protestant minister. Ian.thomson (talk) 21:48, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here in the UK, I've certainly seen plenty of people keep medallions of St Christopher about their persons or in their vehicles for good fortune when travelling; among Anglophone Catholics I've known people pray to St Anthony of Padua for help in finding lost objects. AlexTiefling (talk) 22:33, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If we're going as far as merely carrying medallions or calling on saints, that seems to be common outside of Protestantism. Heck, I have a St. Jude medallion, and I'm Baptist. (...Although I am a very bad example of what Baptists from South Carolina are like.) Ian.thomson (talk) 23:15, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Canada, my mother would write "s.a.g." in a rear corner of an envelope belonging to personal letters. It meant "St. Anthony Guide" and was meant to prevent the letter from getting lost in the mail. I've always wondered where that superstition originated. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.114.87.37 (talk) 00:00, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

My Canadian Christian mother used to tell me the dead could come through the clock to our world at midnight. I suppose that includes saints. 13 is a generally unlucky number. Since the IP above posted at midnight in Greenwich on May 13 (the 133rd day), it seems we may have awaken Julian of Norwich. Don't worry, she's not a witch. But she's probably hungry. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:12, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

Wait, nevermind. It's a leap year. Phew. Turns out she may have been a witch, after all. Lots of 3s and 13s, either way. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:23, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

If you look at the See Also lists in patron saints, there's a very good chance that a superstition exists about all of their invocations protecting their certain something. Did you know an Isidore of Seville USB key can make your PC run like new? InedibleHulk (talk) 00:14, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

All of these superstitions are a reflection of folk religions being overlaid by Catholicism. It's a way for the heavenly hierarchy to accommodate polytheism without overtly embracing it. This kind of stuff is ancient. You're not going to see it in the more modern Christian sects. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:49, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ran across The Golden Bough in my hunt for the Cutty Black Sow yesterday. Damn good book (so far), and explains a lot about the path from magic to religion to science, and the commonalities along the way. I'd recommend it to anyone wondering about questions like this. Not as stuffy as many scholarly books of the time, and can't beat the price. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:26, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

Do bear in mind that it is very much a product of its time, and so has what is now considered some very dodgy scholarship and completely spurious links. Enjoy it, but don't rely on anything you read in it or you'll be laughed at by modern scholars. 86.146.28.105 (talk) 20:15, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why do I pretty much never get a tax return, no matter how much I make?

I don't understand the first thing about taxes so sorry if this is a dumb question. But all my life I've experienced my friends getting large tax returns (e.g. over $1000 for a friend who earns less than $7000 a year, over $500 for a friend with the same as well) while I've always had to pay an unusually high amount - one year I had earned ~$2000 from working, but had withdrawn a $10,000 savings bond to pay for tuition, and I had to pay $3,000 in taxes at year end, more than I had earned working my measly student job for an entire year. This year I have a job where I earn ~40k a year before taxes, and rather than getting a return I have to pay $900. So it's like no matter how much I make I always have to pay an annoyingly high amount. I think the only year I did get a tax return it was for about 9 dollars. I'm a 23 year old single male with no spouse/children. Why do I always get screwed over? Sorry if it's impossible to answer because you'd need to actually look at my personal information or something. NIRVANA2764 (talk) 20:15, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I assume you mean tax refund - your return is the Form 1040 (if you're in the US) and its associated schedules and side forms and any payments you have to make. Most people get refunds from the government because the amount they have withheld by their employers and sent directly to the IRS exceeds the amount of tax they actually wind up owing. This is the biggest factor in most cases. Then, many people who aren't 23 and single have expenses (e.g. childcare, certain healthcare-related expenses, some investment or real-estate improvement credits, mortgage/loan repayment credits, etc, etc, etc) that are tax deductible in one form or another. Beyond these generalities, you are correct that an accountant would be best positioned to give you information relating to your specific case. Sometimes during tax season some preparers will offer to take a look at your return for free - perhaps they could help you out in better detail. Good luck! ☯.Zen Swashbuckler.☠ 20:33, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(ec)Assuming you're American, a "tax return" is the form you file (the 1040) and a "tax refund" is what you get if you were overwithheld, i.e. paid too much tax per check. Which raises the question... Are you having too little withholding taken out? If so, you'll inevitably end up owing at tax time (April 15th). If your income level is fairly consistent, you could look at the total tax for 2013 and divide it by the number of paychecks you get per year. Than check your paystub and see how much is actually being withheld. You can have your employer change your withholding criteria to take out more money up front, and then you will owe a smaller amount at tax time, or maybe even get a refund. If you're unsure, you could give a tax expert like H&R Block a call, but your best bet might be to go right to the source: The IRS.

But here's the thing: Whether you pay on April 15th, get a refund, or break even, you're not getting "screwed" in the bigger picture, because your total tax bill will be the same either way. Your friends that are getting refunds are either having more withheld up front or maybe they have deductions you don't have, such as children and/or paying a home mortgage. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ideally, you want to come out as close to zero as possible on your tax returns. That's because a) if you withhold too little, you have to pay extra to cover the difference, and many people have not budgeted for that or b) if you withhold too much, you're basically giving the government an annual interest-free loan. Getting a fat refund check every year makes people feel good in the short term, but if you had invested that money (or even put it in an interest-bearing savings account or a CD) you'd end up with more money. Withholding extra money from your paycheck doesn't make any financial sense; so ideally you'd want to adjust your deductions so you're getting as small of a refund as possible every year. --Jayron32 20:46, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Or a small net amount owed to the IRS. It's hard to make it come out exactly even, but keeping it small either way is ideal. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:53, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well now, in theory, if you are good at budgeting and have a high tolerance for anxiety, you could do a little better by arranging it so that the bare minimum is withheld during the year to keep you from owing a penalty. Then you're trying to maximize the amount you owe on April 15. Right now, of course, interest rates are so low that it's hard to imagine it's worth the aggravation. --Trovatore (talk) 23:51, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, you can fiddle with your W-4 in various ways, to minimize, maximize or optimize the withholding amount. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:54, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Next year, you should have a tax preparer fill out your tax forms, or invest in software that will guide you through the process. You may be missing deductions that could cut your tax bill and deliver a refund. For example, are you paying student debt? Did you know the interest on that is deductible? Also, any time you get income (such as from a savings bond) from which taxes are not withheld, you have to put some of it aside (one third is a good idea) to cover the taxes on that income. Marco polo (talk) 23:22, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If I were in the OP's shoes, I would get a product such as TurboTax and refigure it for 2013. If the OP figured his taxes correctly, no problem. If he missed some deductions, he could file a revised 1040. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:36, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Is there any (sensible) reason why America does not use a system like PAYE? DuncanHill (talk) 23:38, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]
- That's what federal and state withholding are about. The problem is, the calculations may not come out right, especially if the employee is claiming 1-married instead of 1-single, or some other option that results in not enough tax being taken out. Scarier is the possibility that his company's payroll system is not computing it correctly. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:43, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Example: when I was making just a few cents above minimum wage at Behemart, about 15% of my paychecks were withheld. I'm sure if I asked the company, they'd say it was so that I wouldn't risk having too little withheld. Nevermind that anyone at my pay level gets everything back without filing, and that by filing with proof of student loans, I got everything back and then some. I can only assume corporate was hoping I'd blow it on a bigscreen or something. Ian.thomson (talk) 23:52, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Uh, how do you get anything back without filing? That might be an ignorant question, but I'm used to filing, so it never occurred to me not to. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:56, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, OK, apparently (see below) that can be done in Britain. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:57, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Britain most employees never have to do a tax return - I'm 44 and have never needed to do one. I've had tax refunds through PAYE part-way through a tax year too. My Mum does do one, but she has income from two different pensions, various investments, and a property she rents out. Even then, her return is very simple and her PAYE adjustments on her pensions are generally very small. DuncanHill (talk) 23:55, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

All I know is if I don't make any over-the-table money in a Canadian year, I get a hundred bucks. Not sure how it makes a lick of sense, but it seems fair. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:58, May 12, 2014 (UTC)

A Canadian year? DuncanHill (talk) 00:43, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pretty much the same as any year. Just said it in case someone reading wondered what country this magic happens in. Our April 15 doesn't mean anything, though. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:46, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

Canadian Year... essentially the same as the US year, except the 4th of July occurs on the July 1st and the fourth Thursday in November occurs on the second Monday in October Blueboar (talk) 02:04, 13 May 2014 (UTC) [reply]

And our springs and falls last about three weeks, not months. Our sports season falls in the cold half. "Memorial Day" is something else, too, but I forget. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:15, May 13, 2014 (UTC)

(Sorry, some edit conflicts!) We don't need to file because our employers tell HMRC what they have paid us, and what taxes they have deducted from our pay. Sometimes you might need to ring them up to ask for a Notice of Coding (which tells your employer what your tax code is), but if your income is mainly from employment then you are very unlikely to ever need to do a return. DuncanHill (talk) 23:59, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Our employers do that too (mutatis mutandis). But that leaves out a lot of stuff. How does the gov't know, for example, what property you've sold during the year? Or are capital gains not taxed in the UK? I know there are places where they're not taxed — that would make things a lot simpler. --Trovatore (talk) 02:11, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We do have Capital Gains Tax in the UK, but most people don't have enough capital to be affected by it. Sale of your principal home would not attract CGT. DuncanHill (talk) 02:16, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And of course, Capital Gains Tax would be assessed as CGT, not as Income Tax (which is what PAYE covers). DuncanHill (talk) 02:33, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

International Economic Commissions

Can you cross reference members of the Bohemian Grove Club of California, The Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group? I'm looking to find if there are any members of each organization that also belong to one or more of the others. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Robert796 (talk • contribs) 21:35, 12 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

According to Bohemian Club, they do not publish their current membership rolls. For the other two, Wikipedia does have a List of Bilderberg participants and This page lists the membership of the Trilateral Commission. --Jayron32 00:56, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A Youtube search will produce some interesting videos of a who's-who of members/visitors but again those should be taken with a grain of salt. Richard Nixon did speak about his visit to the Grove on one of the Watergate tapes, sounds like he didn't enjoy it much.^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 05:53, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 13

Any visible parts common to " Statue of Liberty" and "Eiffel Tower"

Curious to know what are the components of Statue of Liberty and any of them common with visible parts of "Eiffel Tower" If not Eiffel Tower , does Statue of Liberty share common things with any other iconic tower.

I have done enough search and did not get significant inputs. Would appreciate any inputs2601:E:2980:30C:D8CE:38C8:530C:A237 (talk) 01:10, 13 May 2014 (UTC)vsmurthy[reply]

The Statue of Liberty article goes into some verbal detail of the construction of Gustav Eiffel's underlying structure for the statue, but what you really need is a diagram, which I don't see in that article. However, there is one, of sorts, in the Gustave Eiffel article. The obvious common factor between them is the criss-cross reinforcements. There could be other similarities that I'm not able to pick out. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:18, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The criss-cross bits that are used in the statue and tower are trusses, and Eiffel seems to have been quite good at understanding how they work. Our article lists several named variants, not sure if Eiffel might have invented any unique types himself. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:42, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I guess Eiffel was very good at understanding trusses since neither structure has fallen over after 100 years. Shii (tock) 14:17, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

State borders in the USA

A recent question on the Science desk made me wonder about the procedure (if there is one) for adjusting state borders in the USA. If two states find that there is an inconvenient irregularity in their border, can they agree between themselves to adjust it, or do they need the consent of the federal government or legislature? DuncanHill (talk) 04:11, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just judging from how other stuff seems to work, probably depends on the size of the irregularity, and how cooperative/apathetic the states involved are. The two states would probably be allowed to sort it for themselves, but could call upon the federal gov't to intervene.

My home state of South Carolina recently had to give up a (laughably) small border town to North Carolina, because more accurate surveying techniques (satellites maybe?) showed that it was within the historically agreed North Carolina border. To my knowledge, it was pretty much a matter of NC saying "hey, SC, check this out," with SC responding "oops, take the town."

Now, if say, all the southeastern United States decided that they wanted to be a part of Texas (and Texas idiotically agreed to that burden for some reason), I'm pretty sure the Federal government would step in and say "look, our voting system is already as balanced as a fat one-legged drunk with an inner ear infection on a unicycle with a vibrator taped to the wheel, we don't need anything to upset it further." Ian.thomson (talk) 04:32, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As always: 'this has already been litigated'.

See: Ohio v Kentucky which went to the US Supreme Court. Any subsequent disagreements would definitely be a 'Federal Case' ;-), and if it was a major change (Ohio v Kentucky was just a disputed border area with less then a 1/4 mile in any one section) it would probably go to Congress.^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 05:49, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The question wasn't about disputed borders, though. Suppose hypothetically that the state of Kentucky decided that since the Kentucky Bend can only be reached from Tennessee, they might as well make a deal to turn it over to Tennessee; and the two state legislatures agree on the terms of the transfer. Then would US law require the federal govenment to be involved, or not? --50.100.193.30 (talk) 09:09, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In Article Four of the United States Constitution, the way I read it, fiddling with borders requires consent of the states and U.S. Congress approval. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 09:15, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Bugs is referring to the constitutional prohibition of Congress changing borders without states' consent. However, when states make agreements with each other, it's known as an "interstate compact", and such a thing requires congressional approval. Here's part of the final paragraph of Article One of the United States Constitution: No State shall, without the Consent of Congress...enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay. If I remember rightly, the point is to ensure that states aren't conspiring secretly. Ironically, although the southern confederacy did basically that at the beginning of the Civil War, their constitution had a similar prohibition, although it had the improvement of not requiring congressional approval for a specific situation: when two states were separated by a river, they didn't need congressional approval for navigational improvements. Nyttend (talk) 12:09, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And yet no source I've managed to dig up regarding the 160-year Southwick Jog dispute between Massachusetts and Connecticut mentions any Congressional involvement whatsoever, even though the final border wasn't settled until 1804. Whether they recalled the complete silence they'd received in response to previous appeals to the English Crown, wanted to stubbornly settle the matter themselves, or whether perhaps federal approval was gained but simply not documented, is unclear. ☯.Zen Swashbuckler.☠ 19:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The issue is usually a (often very important one) of the distinction between one of three very different scenarios, from a legal standpoint:

1) A parcel of land undisputedly part of one state is transferred to another state

2) A parcel of land is claimed by two states, and they work out a solution, either among themselves, or with the help of outside mediators (court system)

3) A parcel of land is mistakenly being administered by one state due to a surveying error at some time in the distant past, and the error is later corrected.

Near as I can tell, ONLY scenario 1 requires Congress to get involved. The Southwick Jog appears to be a clear example of scenario 2, there had been a contention about who had control of that parcel, and there was not clear control of the land by either state. Scenario 3 doesn't come into play here, but DOES come into play in many cases, for example the issues regarding Tennessee-Georgia water dispute or with the recent reassessment of the North Carolina-South Carolina border: [17]. --Jayron32 22:14, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah! Linked from the article about Article 1 is the key legal case: Virginia v. Tennessee. Following the link from there to Findlaw, here's the relevant bit of the actual ruling.

Looking at the clause in which the terms 'compact' or 'agreement' appear, it is evident that the prohibition is directed to the formation of any combination tending to the increase of political power in the states, which may encroach upon or interfere with the just supremacy of the United States. Story, in his Commentaries, (section 1403,) referring to a previous part of the same section of the constitution in which the clause in question appears, observes that its language 'may be more plausibly interpreted from the terms used, 'treaty, alliance, or confederation,' and upon the ground that the sense of each is best known by its association ( 'noscitur a sociis') to apply to treaties of a political character; such as treaties of alliance for purposes of peace and war, and treaties of confederation, in which the parties are leagued for mutual government, political co-operation, and the exercise of political sovereignty, and treaties of cession of sovereignty, or conferring internal political jurisdiction, or external political dependence, or general commercial privileges;' and that 'the latter clause, 'compacts and agreement,' might then very properly apply to such as regarded what might be deemed mere private rights of sovereignty; such as questions of boundary, interests in land situate in the territory of each other, and other internal regulations for the mutual comfort and convenience of states bordering on each other.' And he adds: 'In such cases the consent of congress may be properly required, in order to check any infringement of the rights of the national government; and, at the same time, a total prohibition to enter into any compact or agreement might be attended with permanent inconvenience or public mischief.

Compacts or agreements—and we do not perceive any difference in the meaning, except that the word 'compact' is generally used with reference to more formal and serious engagements than is usually implied in the term 'agreement'—cover all stipulations affecting the conduct or claims of the parties. The mere selection of parties to run and designate the boundary line between two states, or to designate what line should be run, of itself imports no agreement to accept the line run by them, and such action of itself does not come within the prohibition. Nor does a legislative declaration, following such line, that is correct, and shall thereafter be deemed the true and established line, import by itself a contract or agreement with the adjoining state. It is a legislative declaration which the state and individuals affected by the recognized boundary line may invoke against the state as an admission, but not as a compact or agreement. The legislative declaration will take the form of an agreement or compact when it recites some consideration for it from the other party affected by it; for example, as made upon a similar declaration of the border or contracting state. The mutual declarations may then be reasonably treated as made upon mutual considerations. The compact or agreement will then be within the prohibition of the constitution, or without it, according as the establishment of the boundary line may lead or not to the increase of the political power or influence of the states affected, and thus encroach or not upon the full and free exercise of federal authority. If the boundary established is so run as to cut off an important and valuable portion of a state, the political power of the state enlarged would be affected by the settlement of the boundary; and to an agreement for the running of such a boundary, or rather for its adoption afterwards, the consent of congress may well be required. But the running of a boundary may have no effect upon the political influence of either state; it may simply serve to mark and define that which actually existed before, but was undefined and unmarked In that case the agreement for the running of the line, or its actual survey, would in no respect displace the relation of either of the states to the general government.

So no, it is not necessary for the federal government to be involved except maybe if an "important and valuable portion of a state" was involved in the boundary change. --50.100.193.30 (talk) 10:53, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you everyone, very interesting :) DuncanHill (talk) 10:47, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

A recent case is Wendover, Utah, a town on the border with Nevada. Both Utah and Nevada agreed that the town should be moved into Nevada to unite it with the more economically vibrant neighbor West Wendover, Nevada. In 2002, a Congressional resolution passed in the House of Representatives but was blocked in the Senate and hence the town remains in Utah. —D Monack (talk) 00:38, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Makeup

In Western culture, makeup is worn almost exclusively by females. Is this the norm across cultures, or the anomaly? I'm thinking of ancient China, where the men were certainly ornately decorated. Thanks! --Bowlhover (talk) 06:12, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think your assumption is off a bit, aside from circus performers and actors that have always seen Western men in what is basically 'makeup', the infamous Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960 proved that politicians and then TV personalities and then corporate and civic leaders all need the now obligatory makeup artist prep time before any major presentation. Perhaps the 'everyday life' and the 'common man' thing is more what you are asking, but the more powerful and more publicly known the Western man the more that man has worn makeup.^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 06:26, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the OP here is talking about more visible make-up? Futurist110 (talk) 06:53, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

TV appearances are irrelevant to the question. That makeup is done for a particular reason (without it men would look unhealthy under studio lights). The OP is asking about everyday wearing of makeup. --Viennese Waltz 07:36, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like we are assuming much about OPs rather broad question, but the more answers the better.^{Market St.⧏}_{⧐ Diamond Way} 18:44, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Makeup has a lot to do with fascination, so I wonder if any interpretation has ever associated it with the Myth of the Garden? Where men are concerned in any event, beards and mustaches have often been sufficient to build the animal ambiguity which seems to be core of that fascination. --Askedonty (talk) 07:02, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's not very extensive, but we do have Body painting#Indigenous_body_painting, which covers face painting. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:58, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See "Guérewol".—Wavelength (talk) 22:38, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think there's a practical reason why men don't wear facial cosmetics. It tends to clump up when it encounters facial hair, even a five o'clock shadow. So, using cosmetics all day requires that the man shave off any facial hair and/or commit to shaving more often. StuRat (talk) 14:13, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Kamala managed. But yeah, not exactly the typical cosmetics or man. For years, he went about like that in public, protecting the myth, sort of like El Santo. More recently, lots of kids fashion themselves after Jeff Hardy and Justin Bieber. In El Santo's world, they might be called exoticos. More commonly, metrosexual. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:22, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

Amending the U.S. Constitution

I am genuinely curious about this--I apologize if this is a stupid question, but here goes: Are there any limits on how the U.S. Constitution can be amended? In other words, are there any ways in which the U.S. Constitution cannot be amended? For the record, by this, I don't mean the process of amending the U.S. Constitution, but rather the amendments to the U.S. Constitution themselves. If enough people, politicians, judges, and U.S. states hypothetically want an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to say whatever possible thing that they want, would they be guaranteed success in amending the U.S. Constitution in the way which they want to amend it? Futurist110 (talk) 06:50, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Article V is quite simple, just 143 words. The only restriction on what amendments can be passed is that "no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate". There were a couple of other restrictions for a limited time when the Constitution was adopted, but they expired in 1808. --50.100.193.30 (talk) 08:30, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The issue has actually been addressed by the Supreme Court during the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. There was some serious objection to the amendment as itself "Unconstitutional" because the constitution isn't supposed to contain run-of-the-mill legislation; rather the Constitution is supposed to outline how the government is organized and how it operates. The 18th amendment is just a law that people had a hard time getting passed otherwise, so they crammed it into the Constitution, but it's really not a Constitutional issue. However, in This set of rulings, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the amendment, essentially saying that Congress had the right to propose just about anything as a Constitutional amendment. --Jayron32 11:19, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The concept here is an "entrenched clause" - most famously, they're a fundamental aspect of the modern German constitution, which invalidates any amendment that modifies the basic rights of the citizenry or the fundamental nature of the goverment, but they crop up in some other countries as well. That article notes that the US had two (both in article five, as noted above) - one was a temporary provision which has now expired, while the other provides for equal representation in the Senate. It could be argued that this last one is not entirely permanent, as if all fifty states agreed to repeal it the Constitution would not prevent them doing so, but it's certainly placed on a different level to all other provisions. Andrew Gray (talk) 18:08, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Why would any state want to reduce its equal representation in the Senate? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:02, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Obviously they wouldn't. But to pass a constitutional amendment reducing, say, the Connecticut Senate delegation to one non-voting observer, well - three quarters of the states would have to ratify, but it doesn't say which three quarters, now, does it? Obviously that's an extreme and (now we know) unlikely scenario, but one can imagine soon after the original document was written (particularly with lingering Confederation-era resentments still just under the surface) some state or group of states seeking to use the tyranny of the majority to subsume one state under several others. ☯.Zen Swashbuckler.☠ 19:56, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hence the reason for that provision. It doesn't matter if 49 states decide to reduce Connecticut's suffrage in the Senate. Unless Connecticut approved it (for goddess knows what reason), such an amendment would not go. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I've often wondered whether it could be done in two amendments. First amendment deletes the "equal suffrage" clause; second amendment boots out Connecticut. Maybe we should go back in time and ask Kurt Gödel this, the day before his citizenship exam. --Trovatore (talk) 01:26, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Constitution would prohibit the passage of that first amendment unless maybe it was unanimous. So, again I ask, why would any state support potentially having its own equality in the Senate compromised? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:30, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Whom exactly are you asking? No one has said they would.

Still, I can imagine a scenario where it wouldn't be entirely irrational. Let's say you're a Connecticut legislator, and your views have a very temporary majority in the legislature — the writing is on the wall that, in the next senatorial election and for the foreseeable future, senators will be chosen who have policy preferences very very different from yours. Moreover, you care more about actual policy than you do about the influence of Connecticut as a state. I can imagine that it could then make sense to vote for such an amendment. Of course, it won't go over well with the voters, but we're already assuming that that's a lost cause. --Trovatore (talk) 07:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That would be extraordinarily foolish and short-sighted. However, I am confident that the Supreme Court would not allow it to happen once the inevitable court case would reach their desk. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:31, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, but would it? It says you can't amend the constitution to deprive a state of etc etc; it doesn't say you can't amend the constitution to remove that provision. --Trovatore (talk) 01:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Passage of such an amendment would potentially deprive a state of its equal suffrage, so such an amendment should not be constitutional. But if someone did try that ploy, there would be a court challenge regarding the obvious violation of the intent of that clause. Keep in mind that the whole reason for the equal representation in the Senate was to get the Constitution ratified by giving the states a forum in which they were all represented equally, to keep the bigger states such as Virginia from dominating the federal legislature. Take that away, and the deprived states might say, "See ya." So, again I say again, why would any state support such an amendment? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:45, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a thought experiment: imagine that a state is splitting in two, say North and South Florida, with both parts intending to remain in the US. Everyone is pretty relaxed about this - it doesn't have much effect on the inhabitants of the two Floridas, who each have a state government hopefully more responsive to their local interests than the old one was, and the federal congressional delegations remain the same - they agree to split them 13-14. But there's a problem in the Senate - why should New Florida get four Senators when Old Florida had just two? The senators from everywhere else complain, understandably, and a compromise is reached: Florida say that in order to be allowed to break up, they'll agree to just have one each. The net balance of power is conserved, but the two individual states are worse off than the other 49.

Sure, it's an improbable thought experiment, but stranger things have happened in constitutional democracies trying to solve intractable dilemmas :-). Andrew Gray (talk) 18:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The courts would have to decide the matter. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 23:42, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note that our article on the concept linked above actually mentions the lack of entrenchment of the entrenchment clause in the US constitution as a possible problem. Our article mentions Australia and NZ has a similar issue where it's normally suggested that Parliamentary sovereignty means that parliament can't actually entrench any entrenchment clauses (although not all commentators agree). Of course, Australia actually has a written constitution (and other parts?) which are considered entrenched and above parliamentary sovereignty. Of course, even in cases where the entrechment is questionable or there is no entrechment, you may involve Constitutional convention (political custom), and the unpredictable effects of trying to go against them in a serious manner e.g. will the courts actually involve themselves, will the civil service accept such changes, will the government inspire revolution, how will the head of state respond? (If you consider the US case to be really entrenched, there's the question of whether the entirety of Article 5 is entrenched or only the entrenchment part.) Nil Einne (talk) 14:50, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The founding fathers created a fair amount of flexibility, so not all possible scenarios are necessarily allowed for. This is where the Supreme Court comes in. Assuming there's a challenge to such an amendment, the high court would have to decide whether there is in fact a constitutional right for a state to give up its equality in the Senate. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:10, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In all fairness, I wouldn't expect any mention of it to come up; if states are modifying their borders slightly, ending a long dispute, I wouldn't imagine anyone in Congress to raise a stink about it. It would probably go through each house's committee unanimously, get approved with unanimity or near unanimity, and signed by the President with little or no fanfare. Everyone's attention after the fact would be on the states that were resolving the dispute and the politicians who had resolved it, and even while it was happening, most sources would be paying attention to the people who had just become residents of a different state. After all, most new laws get little or no attention, simply because they're thoroughly non-controversial, so the actual approval of this interstate compact would probably be as insignificant as (to pick a random number) Public Law 113-114, the "Animal Drug and Animal Generic Drug User Fee Reauthorization Act of 2013". Nyttend (talk) 21:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Legal question

This ? regards lawyer conduct in a court room. Case involves child support. Defense lawyer sends his client home during court without notification of it to plaintiff. This causes plaintiff to sit in court, expecting case to be called and effectively wasting the day for plaintiff. Plaintiff finally approached bar, asked what was happening. DSS and ADA searched out the defendants lawyer who at that time admitted sending his client home earlier in the day. When asked what he was going to do, his reply was "I don't know", turned and walked away. He was called back, he refused to give an adequate answer, was rude, turned and walked away again. This happened once again. Finally, the plaintiff was told nothing could be done and to go home. The case had to be continued. This plaintiff is the sole caretaker for two small children, needs to work and was kept out of work by an inconsiderate lawyer while the defendant was allowed to leave early to pursue whatever. The defendant was $2500.00 behind in child support but did pay up to date that morning. What can be done with situations such as these? Lawyers are supposed to uphold the law and the rights of individuals. However, when approached, this lawyer indicated his belief was that he was not accountable for any loss of time or expense for the plaintiff due to his behavior. Thanks for any input Frustrated!! — Preceding unsigned comment added by Elton rouse (talk • contribs) 15:08, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You need to seek a lawyer. We cannot help you. --Jayron32 16:05, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

We cannot give legal advice. But I can tell you that if you have a complaint about a specific lawyer, you can contact the bar association in your jurisdiction, and perhaps the better business bureau. Good luck, SemanticMantis (talk) 22:37, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Friend Of The Court

We don't seem to have an article on this. It's just a redirect to another article on a somewhat related topic. Briefly, the FotC, in Michigan, at least, is a court appointed officer whose job is to collect money from one party and distribute it to another, taking action when the party owing money by a court judgment does not pay in a timely manner. I'm familiar with the FotC being used in child support cases, but they might also be used more broadly. So:

1) Does this office just exist in Michigan ?

2) Is it used more broadly ?

3) Do we have an article on it ? StuRat (talk) 14:05, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Water faucets

Is there any reason for which the left handle on showers and sinks, etc., is for hot water and the right handle is for cold water (in the United States)? Or is this just so that there is some uniformity? Also, is this the same in other countries, or does this differ from place to place? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 16:03, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the U.S., apparently, that orientation of the fittings is required by something called the "Uniform Plumbing Code". See this article which mentions it. It doesn't say why it is not the other way around, per se, but it does say that standards require it to always be the same way. --Jayron32 16:09, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is no such uniformity in the UK. I have a bathroom in which the bath is one way round and the sink is the other. AlexTiefling (talk) 16:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Though (OR) it is my impression that we have been getting more uniform (matching the American system) over the past fifty years. When I first encountered the American assumption that hot would be on the left, I remember thinking it odd; but now I am surprised when I encounter a sink that does not follow this convention. --ColinFine (talk) 16:47, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The only reasonable explanation I found when Googling:

Fine-tuning the temperature (i.e. mixing hot and cold water) will be simpler for right handed people, i.e. the majority. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 18:25, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's a simpler point, also favoring the right-handed majority: you don't always use both taps. Sometimes you just want cold water. --50.100.193.30 (talk) 10:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wow, that's very interesting. I would have never thought of that. Although my first reaction is that a person can fine-tune the temperature with either hot or cold water (i.e., increasing/decreasing amount of hot water OR increasing/decreasing amount of cold water). Thus, either hand will work. In other words, one does not "fine tune" with cold water alone. Or am I missing something? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 18:44, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That would be why I do not like that now almost ubiquituous single handle mixer faucet. I'm right-handed and I've noted that I can't get a warm mix in town anymore, without having to put my left arm to work or play curious finger-palm acrobatics. Note that with a two handle faucet I never bothered if it was standart or a reversed. --Askedonty (talk) 18:51, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not crazy about those either, but things could be worse: In the old-old days, there were separate faucets for hot and cold.[18] To wash you face, shave, etc., you would fill the sink with a mixture, as with filling a bathtub. Also note that the faucets are labeled H and C, which is a must, especially if they're not installed in the conventional way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:09, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Does that work for non-English speakers? HiLo48 (talk) 00:45, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The concept works in any language as long as the designations on the faucets are unambiguous. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:38, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Like the French ones, which are of course appropriately labelled C for hot and F for cold. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 02:04, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(Not to mention the potential confusion of caldo for German-speaking tourists (compare kalt)). I've always found faucets using red and blue blobs on their handles useful. Googling it to find some reference, the first hits were about temperature-sensitive LED light faucets. Something I didn't even know existed. My bathroom fixtures are from the 1950s. ---Sluzzelin talk 02:20, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Wow. I though there were standards about taking pictures also. I'm not often going enthusiastic about granting monopolies to syndicates but sometimes you may wonder. --Askedonty (talk) 19:38, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Standards about taking pictures? No. None. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe try like this; although I reckon this sort of leading us away from the UPC. --Askedonty (talk) 06:46, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In France you can remember that gauche is chaud and droite is froid because the vowels match. Cold is on the right because most people are right handed and will reach naturally for the cold tap first, thus avoiding scalding themselves. That's the explanation a French plumber gave me anyway, and I'm inclined to trust him. Same handedness is in the UK Building Regulations, although not everyone realises. Taplexia. Itsmejudith (talk) 07:44, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I read this theory somewhere [possibly in one of the "Imponderables"-books by David Feldman]: Before the invention of hot water boilers all taps were cold and to the right because most people are right handed. So when boilers were invented they put the new hot tap on the left. 93.95.251.190 (talk) 14:54, 14 May 2014 (UTC) Martin.[reply]

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 17:04, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Pink Dollar generated in the United States

Hello! I'm in search of information about the amount of money the 'pink dollar' generated in the United States in the past 10-20 years within the LGBT tourism market niche. Therefore I'm looking for a diagram or at least some figures to generate a diagram for a powerpoint presentation. I hope someone can help me. Regards, Dionysos1988 (talk) 18:34, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

At a glance, there isn't much on Google scholar. You can imagine how hard it is to determine if expenditures have anything to do with sexual orientation... anyway, best I could find was this [19], which talks about New Zealand. I don't really know this field, perhaps "pink dollar" isn't the best search term for academic works. If I really had to find more, I'd start searching related things like /gay impact economy/ SemanticMantis (talk) 22:34, 13 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And be sure your sources aren't referring to the "pink collar" sector. Anyway, wasn't "lavender" formerly the color associated with homosexuality relative to mainstream culture (before the LGBT rainbow spectrum)? -- Deborahjay (talk) 05:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I hear "pink dollar", I think of the (probable) trillions made from products which remind us of boobs to get us to pay a buck or so toward them. These ladies are the real cash cows, and I think the gays would stay better off calling it "pink money" (or something else). That brand image is as taken as they come, and they don't seem ready to let go. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:32, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

This "brand image" is evidently not so "taken" when an active contributing editor to the English-language Wikipedia Reference desk refers to the issue of seeking a cure for breast cancer as reminding [us] [?!] of boobs (the latter word without scare quotes). Once I followed the piped link above to Pinkwashing, I realized that this will not pass without my overt comment here. -- Deborahjay (talk) 06:54, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I piped it to pinkwashing, rather than Pink ribbon, to avoid pissing anyone off. Sorry. There's a good side and a bad side, and the bad side's lucrativeness is apparent in the blog article I linked. Since they were misinterpeted as "scare quotes", I've removed them. Not sure what you inferred, but I probably didn't mean to imply it. Words are tricky that way, especially typed. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:04, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

When writing on this public online forum where people ask queries to gather information, you might consider whether it's appropriate to use language such as you did above and in your edit summary. Besides "pissing anyone off" - did you consider that some people are offended or hurt by vulgar language and cheap humor (boobs, cows, udders - no quotes provided) in reference to the widespread and often deadly and disfiguring diseases that are breast cancer, striking so many women and irreparably harming them and their loved ones. -- Deborahjay (talk) 07:14, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, sorry everyone. I'll give you the long answer on your Talk Page, more private. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:38, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

May 14

Events known by different names in different countries

Is there a Wikipedia list or some other source that lists events that are known by completely different names in different countries based on their perspective of the event (e.g., the Spanish–American War known in Spain as the Disaster of 1898)? czar ♔ 01:33, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I can't find a list, but I can make this one longer. The Turkish-Armenian War was just the Eastern Front of a wider war, to some.

On the other hand, what we call merely the Eastern Front (World War II) was the Great Patriotic War to the Russians. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 02:53, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Going through List of battles and looking at the lead sentence may be helpful (though more tedious than you'd probably like). InedibleHulk (talk) 02:45, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

The US of course had the War of Northern Aggression, depending on your perspective. 70.36.142.114 (talk) 03:22, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And for those who didn't like the term Civil War, it was also called The War Between the States. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:32, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hell, most of the battles were named differently depending on which side you were on. (First Battle of Bull Run / First Manassas, Battle of Antietam / Battle of Sharpsburg, and so on.) — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite 18:50, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The article American Revolution states that the British use the arguably more accurate designation "American War of Independence". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And pretty much every war is just "The War" to someone. So much so that we don't even bother at the disambiguation page. So in a sense, I'm giving a pretty crappy answer. What we have here...is a failure...to communicate. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:42, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

Vietnam War says "also known as the Second Indochina War, and known by the Vietnamese as the American War." HiLo48 (talk) 03:46, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

"The Day of the Battle of Puebla" is commonly called the fifth of May. (And we're all focusing pretty hard on war events, aren't we?) InedibleHulk (talk) 03:49, May 14, 2014 (

The world's first global war (or its various theaters) is known as the French and Indian War, War of the Conquest, Pomeranian War, Third Carnatic War, Third Silesian War, or Seven Years' War. Another example that comes to my mind is the Battle of Grunwald / First Battle of Tannenberg. — Kpalion^(talk) 04:57, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How can anyone stay mad at a Pomeranian? InedibleHulk (talk) 05:21, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

Speaking of tricolours, the July Revolution has a few names. Getting away from France proper and war for a bit, see jeux olympiques d'hiver. French language, but globally official. InedibleHulk (talk) 05:29, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

As a Holocaust archivist writing in English from sources in numerous languages, here's my working solution: From the WP page in your native language, go to the interwiki link for the corresponding page in the language of interest. (Presumably such a page exists because the conflict will be relevant to speakers of the target language.) I then transcribe or transliterate the name in the original language followed by a gloss of its meaning in English. When I can't determine this from the text, I post the query to the Wikipedia Language Reference desk. Note that this is also useful for names of organizations, military and otherwise, and of course exonyms for place names. -- Deborahjay (talk) 05:42, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The Indian Rebellion of 1857 is known as India's First War of Independence (term) in India. --EditorMakingEdits (talk) 08:32, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indian Rebellion of 1857? Ooh, that's a new one to me - Indian Mutiny, Great Mutiny, Sepoy Mutiny, and India's First War of Independence are all familiar to me. DuncanHill (talk) 11:26, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's a display at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich which mentions both 'Mutiny' and 'First War of Independence' versions. It strongly suggests that neither is fully adequate (and gives reasons), but does not propose a third option. 'Indian Rebellion of 1857' is not mentioned, and is new to me as well, as far as I can recall. AlexTiefling (talk) 16:09, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Korean War is knwon as Fatherland Liberation War in North Korea. --EditorMakingEdits (talk) 08:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Our article World War II says that it ran from 1939 to 1945. Americans apparently have another name for the first two years of that period, but I don't know what it is. HiLo48 (talk) 08:38, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

At least one Dane called it the "Northern European Overture to War". His book costs $209 US. Shipping's free. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:17, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

As far as I know, Americans have the exact same starting and ending points for WWII as everyone else, and there is not a special, uniquely American term for the first two years of the war. There is the term Phoney War sometimes applied to part of the first year or so of the conflict, but again I don't know that the term is uniquely American. --Jayron32 11:06, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They had their own uniquely infamous date, though. Wikipedia calls the post-era "Military history of the United States during World War II", but that's not catchy. The oft-forgotten 1937-45 part has a whole section on its different names. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:24, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

When the winter solstice strikes in Greenland, New Zealanders call it the summer solstice. Good reason for that, but this ain't the science desk. InedibleHulk (talk) 09:49, May 14, 2014 (UTC)

The Nagorno-Karabakh War was known as the Artsakh Liberation War in Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. --Viennese Waltz 09:55, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

September 11 attacks has some different namings in different countries, primarily as the dominant US name "9/11" don't have the same connotation where 911 isn't the emergency phone number and where dates are written "day/month" (would be 11/9). --Soman (talk) 10:29, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the UK, "9/11" is called exactly that, even though that designates the 9th of November for us Limeys. It isn't our emergency number, either. --Dweller (talk) 12:20, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed: however a London Ambulance Service paramedic recently told me that dialling "911" in the UK now connects you to the emergency switchboard, as so many people - fed on a diet of US films and TV - think it's the correct number to dial, instead of "999" or the pan-European "112". I haven't tried it though. Alansplodge (talk) 16:11, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Your ambulance person is an idiot, and downright dangerous to the public. Dialling 911 in the UK will not connect you to the emergency operator. Lots of normal numbers start with, or contain, the string 911. DuncanHill (talk) 18:30, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I will pass on your comments. Alansplodge (talk) 20:10, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am sorry Alansplodge for the strong words, but dialing the wrong number in an emergency can cost lives. In the UK dial 999 or 112. For an ambulance professional to propagate urban myths is highly irresponsible. DuncanHill (talk) 20:18, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Fair point Duncan and I don't disagree. A quick Google suggests that it is a quite widely held belief. Our 999 (emergency telephone number)#History article says: "It has been reported that some mobile phone handsets sold in the United Kingdom and Ireland may connect calls dialled as 911 to the GSM standard emergency number 112. It is also possible that 911 may be mapped inappropriately to emergency services in some VoIP equipment or private networks. However, the digits 911 could form the start of a normal local number in Ireland or the United Kingdom, so the code is not supported by the public telephone networks. This is simply a quirk of programming. 911 is not the official number and cannot be relied upon in case of an emergency". I still won't be trying it. Alansplodge (talk) 20:27, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I had a British jokebook as a kid. How do you make a policeman come running on his hands? Dial 666. As a Canadian Judas Priest fan, it took me years to understand there was no link to Satan. And also that Judas Priest was British. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:09, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

Our September 11 attacks article says: "9/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation. The name is frequently used in British English as well as American English although the dating conventions differ.", but large parts of the world is not Anglo-phone, and "nine eleven" doesn't translate (albeit, many people in non-English speaking contexts still use the English "nine eleven" in conversation. But it would not be used by say, on the TV news). --Soman (talk) 07:40, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the US, prior to the 9/11/01 attacks, 911 was often referred to as "nine-eleven". Hence the old joke, "Why couldn't the blonde call the emergency service? Because there was no 'eleven' on her phone." Since then, "nine-eleven" nearly always refers to the attacks, and the emergency call system is nearly always called "nine-one-one". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:45, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

enquiry about the original book of Robinson Crusoe

Good afternoon,

I've just read the Wikipedia article about the book of Robinson Crusoe, trying to find out just how long was the original unabridged version, including the second part of the book (further adventures of Robinson Crusoe or some similar name)- how many words in the book if it is possible to discover this.

I read the book as a seven year old, wading through every word of it, which took me a few months and which I now realise was a mammoth undertaking for a young child and one which most even far older children would never dream of attempting.

Is there some way of finding out the length - total of pages and words - in the original version? And is there anywhere online I can read this book again?

Sincerely, Lori Australia 124.171.139.173 (talk) 06:55, 14 May 2014 (UTC)≈≈≈≈[reply]

Project Gutenberg should help. You can download the text and get your word processor to count the words. HiLo48 (talk) 07:51, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There are direct links to various versions of the book at Robinson Crusoe, including this plain text version from Gutenberg. MS Word tells me the main body of the text contains 232,236 words (about three times a typical modern novel), which is certainly good going for a seven-year-old. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 10:34, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there are many classics available free of charge as ebooks, notably from Project Gutenberg but even from Amazon.[20][21] [22] If you haven't already, you could also try Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone where Gabriel Betteredge considers that "such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again" and so considerately believes "there are great allowances to be made for a man who has not read Robinson Crusoe since he was a child".[23] Thincat (talk) 12:15, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Arbeitskarte work papers during World War II

I read in the denaturalization decision of Theodor Szehinskyj that (according to the historian picked by the US government to testify in the denaturalization trial) laborers in Axis-occupied territories during World War II were issued work cards (known as Arbeitskarten) which, if these people were on the streets, Gestapo officers would often stop them to check their work papers. If someone was discovered carrying an expired and/or otherwise invalid Arbeitskarte, that person would be considered to have no identity or to have broken a labor contract, both of which were sufficient grounds for them to be sent to a concentration camp. I have tried to find other literature documenting this issue but have had no success so far. Does anyone know of the existence of such literature? 24.47.140.246 (talk) 07:12, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It seems like you might be able to get more details about the work papers system in the book Hungern für Hitler. There is a blurry picture of such a card on page 157 of this PDF. Shii (tock) 02:44, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What is the problem with a morphine overdose as a means of execution?

It is not cruel (morphine is a narcotic), it is not uncommon (junkies on every major city do it), it is sure (the effect is well-known substance and the lethal dose can be calculated), there is plenty of it around (morphine has legit applications, so no way of blocking its commercialization). OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:53, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I saw a short BBC(?) show whose presenter concluded, "If we must have the death penalty, nitrogen asphyxiation would be most humane way." He spoke to a defender of the death penalty who said, "No!! Justice requires that the convict suffer." (I paraphrase.) —Tamfang (talk) 17:17, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have a compromise for the right and the left: Explode his head between 350mph mallets. Wash everything into a meatgrinder that leads to the sewer so no one sees it. Make sure he did it! Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:18, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Reminds me of Jack Vance's Emphyrio. The extreme penalty in Fortinone is exile into Bauredel, a neighboring district. The exilee's departure is hurried along by a giant piston. In Bauredel, a quarter-inch over the border, stands a sturdy stone wall. —Tamfang (talk) 19:56, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That would be unusual, the way has to fulfill all the criteria above. And the defendant of the death penalty was not right in legal terms, that was just his preference. OsmanRF34 (talk) 19:20, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What's the unusual part? Nitrogen? An airtight room? – The advocate of cruelty was speaking of policy, not law. —Tamfang (talk) 19:56, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As I posted in the last discussion on the death penalty, the programme was a BBC programme presented by Michael Portillo called "How to Kill a Human Being". --TammyMoet (talk) 21:09, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The drugs used in lethal injections often have parallel legitimate applications; they are often widely sold and distributed, in fact. The problem (for the executioners) is that pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to sell their drugs for this purpose; some jurisdictions also expressly forbid such sales. EU regulations, for instance, prohibit the export of any pharmaceutical product for use in executions. See this reprint of a Scientific American article on the topic:

...Supplies of propofol, a widely used anesthetic, came close to being choked off as a result of Missouri’s plan to use the drug for executions. The state corrections department placed an order for propofol from the U.S. distributor of a German drug manufacturer. The distributor sent 20 vials of the drug in violation of its agreement with the manufacturer, a mistake that the distributor quickly caught. As the company tried in vain to get the state to return the drug, the manufacturer suspended new orders. The manufacturer feared that if the drug was used for lethal injection, E.U. regulators would ban all exports of propofol to the U.S. “Please, Please, Please HELP,” wrote a vice president at the distributor to the director of the Missouri corrections department. “This system failure—a mistake—1 carton of 20 vials—is going to affect thousands of Americans.”

This was a vast underestimate. Propofol is the most popular anesthetic in the U.S. It is used in some 50 million cases a year—everything from colonoscopies to cesareans to open-heart surgeries—and nearly 90 percent of the propofol used in the U.S. comes from the E.U. After 11 months, Missouri relented and agreed to return the drug.

In principle, I suppose, a death-penalty state could create its own pharma company for the production of death drugs, but so far that hasn't happened yet. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 21:02, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In theory, the Euro companies that refuse to sell their drugs to US prisons could be banned, by the US Congress, from selling drugs of any kind to any US customer. That could cause a lot of collateral damage, but theoretically it's possible. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:41, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If they're looking for an extremely common, well-tested and legal method that people in the streets of major cities do to escape pain everyday, they can find it at Wal-Mart. Same tool they use to execute almost every other American animal. And if Wal-Mart's too expensive, some places are (almost) cheaper than dirt. Once Pfizer runs the guns, it'll probably become acceptable again. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:51, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

Sure, firing squad is one of several options still available. Hanging is another. Electric chair maybe. Although now that lethal injection has become standard, lawyers might argue that those other methods are "unusual" and hence unconstitutional. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:06, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, no squad. Too much glamour, too many bullets and executioners. Just one in the heart. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:49, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

Why'd they even put that word in there? The thing we really care about is the not cruel. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:18, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Depends who "we" are, I guess. In the context of the law-passing, they were we. Personally, the idea of lethal injection is as unusual as when I first heard of it. It's like Mousetrap. That bugs me more than a bit of cruelty (provided they have the actual cruel killer). InedibleHulk (talk) 11:46, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

The theory was that lethal injection should take the "cruel" part out of it. The recent fiascos with untested drugs may force a re-think of that assumption. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:34, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I know the theory. Makes the whole thing seem even stranger. If they want to keep up illusions, I suppose they could still restrain and paralyze the guy before shooting him. And they could still draw the curtain if he (God forbid) gasps or twitches, as dying people do. The prison PR people could still swear he was fine. InedibleHulk (talk) 12:48, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

Where there's a will, there's a way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:06, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

If gays had rights, thieves would have rights too

What kind of fallacy is this? It is obviously anti-gay, but I am interested in the logical non-sequitur problem of this way of thinking. OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:59, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's a false equivocation; there's no reason a priori to think that the two groups named have any relevant factor in common. It's also slippery slope, and the consequent is neither false nor transparently undesirable; thieves do in fact have rights in law (at least in most democratic nations), and society has not ground to a halt. AlexTiefling (talk) 16:06, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Keep in mind one use of "non sequitur" is as a name for a type of logical fallacy. This page [24] gives more of a logical perspective. The fallacy is that, true or false, the consequent is not entailed by the premise. (post EC) I disagree that your example fits well into the slippery slope: that usually pertains to things that are more or less continuous, e.g. "if we let 18 year old buy alcohol, then pretty soon they will want 17 years to be the age, and soon enough we'll have 10 year olds drinking!" SemanticMantis (talk) 16:13, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I suspect the reasoning runs like this: "Homosex, theft, murder and idolatry are bad because they are forbidden in the Bible. (It would be wrong to bring up non-Biblical arguments against any of them, because that would amount to saying the Word of God is not sufficient reason to obey.) Thus homosex is morally equivalent to anything else that the Bible forbids, and to defend homosexuals is to defend thieves." It's a bit like affirming the consequent ("all mortals are Socrates") but not exactly. —Tamfang (talk) 17:26, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But thieves DO have rights. Many rights. It's just a dumb thing to say. HiLo48 (talk) 17:22, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the complainers might be less excited if all you wanted were to guarantee the filthy somdomites a fair trial before their stoning. —Tamfang (talk) 17:26, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

It's smuggling in the unstated premise that thievery and homosexuality are criminal. Most Western people don't accept the premise that sexual acts between consenting adults are criminal. μηδείς (talk) 17:51, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

What about agreeing to an hour of sex with an economy sized roll of tape on your head? I wonder if legal prostitution is favored by >50% of Westerners? Maybe. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 11:43, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The logical problem is still the smugling in of the unstated premise, which it seems the two opponents would not agree on, ending the argument. As for the facts, I may be wrong. But I suspect there's opposition to notorious and public drunkenness and prostitution, and unregulated use of Marjuana and so forth, rather than a metaphysical opposition to them. μηδείς (talk) 18:10, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Note: I was quoting not verbatim, but as I remembered the sentence. Indeed it was "If homosexuals are allowed to change the law in their favor, why not prostitutes, thieves, or murderers." In a context of a speech against acknowledging the gay civil rights movement. OsmanRF34 (talk)

(Of course, we do let more than a few thieves change the laws; either we elect them to office directly, or the thieves ~~bribe them~~ contribute to their campaigns.)

Incidentally, I read the statement as originally formulated in the thread header ("If gays had rights, thieves would have rights too") as being a technically true statement. It's rather akin to saying "If vegetarians had rights, plumbers would have rights too"; some of the people in the first named group (vegetarians or homosexuals) happen to also be members of the second group (thieves or plumbers). There are gay thieves; there are vegetarian plumbers. (There are also non-gay thieves, and omnivorous plumbers. And gay non-thieves, and vegetarian non-plumbers. And so on.) I figured that the purpose of such a statement is to imply without explicitly stating it that gays are associated with and/or disproportionately represented among thieves. It's not quite an affirming-the-consequent fallacy (or any fallacy) so much as an invitation to fallacious reasoning. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 20:52, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I keep thinking of George Dyer, who was discovered breaking into Francis Bacon (artist)'s house and was given the choice of accompanying Bacon either to the police station or to his bed. He chose the latter. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:24, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Responding to that quote, both homosexuality and prostitution, if crimes at all, are "victimless crimes". Or, to be more specific, the "victim", if one can be identified, gives their consent. So, it might be reasonable to say "If we allow homosexuality then we should also allow prostitution". Theft and murder, of course, are not victimless crimes, as no consent was given, so that part is silly. StuRat (talk) 22:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

<whacko simulation mode> Nonsense! The victim is everyone forced to endure the presence of immorality. Won't someone think of the children? </mode> —Tamfang (talk) 07:31, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That's a bit of a strawman, especially with regards to prostitution. Issues are rarely as simple as a transaction between two completely independent consenting people; the institution of prostitution as a whole raises issues regarding forced sexual slavery, or wage slavery where the prostitute is beholden to the pimp, sexual exploitation of women, etc. etc. I'm not saying that these are the ONLY factors to consider, but there is a multitude of confounding factors when we're trying to decide how to handle, as a society, an issue like this. The existance of these confounding factors is not, in itself, a prescription for a simple course of action (such as jailing women who engage in prostitution, or men who pay women for sex, etc.) rather, it just means that it isn't as simple as the false dichotomy of "men and women should be allowed to exchange money for sex freely" and "It's just immoral so we shouldn't do it". Neither of those positions significantly represents the actual practice, and unless we're willing to face the actual way prostitution works, and all that entails, trite solutions like "we should do nothing" and "we should arrest everyone and charge them with felonies" are both inadequate. --Jayron32 12:41, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, just because something is legal doesn't mean it shouldn't be regulated. Just as alcohol is legal, but that doesn't mean it's legal to drive drunk or sell it to minors, similarly kinds of sex can be legal, without making it legal to knowingly spread disease, or for a pimp to beat a prostitute. In both these cases, I would expect current laws to apply. However, additional laws, like those requiring regular medical exams for prostitutes, might also be a good idea.

And note that being illegal automatically denies those who engage in that behavior from protection under the law, as they would have to admit to their illegal activities to explain why they were assaulted. StuRat (talk) 13:18, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I also suspect there's some circular logic in place. In a nation where homosexuality and prostitution are both illegal, one could argue that "Those are crimes, therefore people who commit those crimes are criminals, and we shouldn't enabled criminals to legally engage in such behavior". Of course, this boils down to "anything which is now illegal should stay illegal forever". StuRat (talk) 22:40, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Some member of the US Cabinet (iirc) said, "It is a misconception that if the law against something is repealed then it is no longer illegal." (I paraphrase, of course.) —Tamfang (talk) 07:31, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Actually, that can be true, if it was also illegal under another law. One example is that bald eagles are no longer protected under the Endangered Species Act. However, they are still protected under an earlier law which was written because they are the US's national symbol, not endangered. Another example is that as states legalize marijuana, the Feds can still arrest people under federal law. StuRat (talk) 12:55, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

At the heart of Stu's argument, of course, is the issue of natural law. The source of conflict is the difference in paradigm between the notion that "There's an ideal way people should behave, and laws should merely exist to recognize that natural order" and "laws are entirely creations of humans in a specific context, and therefore there is no higher principle besides what the powers decide". The problem with position #1 is that it presumes that we all would agree at what the natural order is; clearly we don't. The problem with position #2 is it leads to tyrrany: If the law is just what the government says it is, without any higher principle than the people making the laws, there is not restraint on the government from making any arbitrary law it wants to. Either "something is a crime because it's bad, and so people shouldn't do it" or "something is a crime because the people in charge says it is". That's the core of the conflict. --Jayron32 12:48, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

But even if a majority agree that something is bad, making it a crime still isn't always the best option. Look at Prohibition, for example. In a Detroit suburb, they are considering making it illegal to idle your car for more than 5 minutes, which would require that cops park up by you and wait 5 minutes, which is both rather a waste of time for the cops and Big Brotherish for the driver. Also, the cops are likely to idle at the same time. StuRat (talk) 12:52, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed. The terminology of 'rights' can be misleading here. When talking about laws, we say that a thing is illegal if it is against the human law, immoral if it is against (what we think we agree is) the 'natural' moral law, and impossible if it is against (our current understanding of) the physical law. Conflating the first two gives the presumption that the human law can always be agreed on and always be moral (as in Jayron's case #1). But when we speak of 'rights', it's very common to equivocate rights we feel people ought to have with rights the law actually grants them at present. (We also sometimes equivocate universal rights with permissive rights such as rights of way.) As someone who is in favour of a human-rights-based approach to law and society, I wish we had a less ambiguous way of talking about these concepts. AlexTiefling (talk) 12:57, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I think the best way is to have laws expire (see sunset clause and desuetude) and do referendums to see if they should be extended. That way we know what the current society thinks is good or bad, so hopefully don't leave any laws on the books making it illegal for women to show their ankles. StuRat (talk) 13:05, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

West Georgia, Alaska

What, if anything, do we know about part of far northern Alaska being called "West Georgia?" Google only finds pages about Alaska related to the University of West Georgia. 2001:18E8:2:1020:747B:79F0:67B3:36A1 (talk) 18:29, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

How about this?

Note: Escholtz Bay is now spelled Eschscholtz Bay. הסרפד (call me Hasirpad) 19:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict)

Only thing I've found is a Google Books reference, Dictionary of Alaska Place Names. Quote:

"Name shown on Capt. F. W. Beechey's chart of Point Rodney to Point Barrow, 1826 — 27."

So, it sounds like the name was added by the mapmaker. — The Hand That Feeds You:^Bite

Indeed Italian geographer Adriano Balbi in several of his works names Capt. Beechey (Compendio di geografia) as originator for that designation. Wasn't this perhaps some kind of a distant acknowledgement of the definitive independence of the United States relatively to the British Crown ? --Askedonty (talk) 19:48, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Frederick William Beechey was not a mapmaker (well, only incidentally) - he was the naval explorer who first named the area. This seems to confirm that he came up with "West Georgia", and that it never passed into general use. Interestingly, the name isn't used in his 1831 book of the voyage, so perhaps he dropped it quite soon after first publishing the map.

It's unlikely that it had anything to do with the United States - Alaska was Russian at this point, and there was a lot of British North America and disputed territory to get through after that before you reached the US! Andrew Gray (talk) 19:52, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

More likely a reference to (East) Georgia, a part of the Russian Empire since 1800. I took the liberty of thumbnailing (?) the map to tidy the page. Alansplodge (talk) 20:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Disability

The name and reference to persons with disabilities are constantly changing. Each time a suggestion is made, it is played down by an individual or group as being offensive. I work with "Persons with disabilities" I my country, but we are not too sure how these persons are to be referred. Can you tell me the best term to refer to persons with disabilities? When we say "persons with Disabilities" they say all persons have some sort of disability. I am confused.190.213.37.76 (talk) 21:36, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, there's a habit of coming up with more extreme euphemisms to describe anything bad (see euphemism treadmill#Disability and handicap). Just as we went from "mentally retarded" to "special", we also went from "crippled" to "handicapped" to "disabled" to "differently-abled". Of course, at this point the euphemism no longer means anything (aren't we all "special" and "differently-abled" ?). If you feel the need to be politically correct, then you will use the latest euphemism, no matter how imprecise it is. However, in a more scientific setting they will likely use more accurate words, like "disabled". However, I would suggest you say "physically disabled", if that's what you mean, to distinguish from the "mentally disabled". As you might expect, the physically disabled don't like being lumped in with the mentally disabled, especially if their physical disability can be mistaken for a mental one, like in the case of the deaf and dumb (PC term: deaf-mute). StuRat (talk) 22:08, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, we do not all have some kind of disability. 'People with disabilities' is sufficiently clear for most purposes. Specify physical or mental disabilities as necessary. You don't say what country you're in; not all of what StuRat has said necessarily applies everywhere (or anywhere). For example, 'special' never fully took on the meaning he describes here in the UK - 'special school' was a recognised expression, but calling a person with a disability 'special' would come off as extremely patronising here. And there's a countervailing conservative tendency to complain about the changes of terminology, regardless of whether the changes serve any useful purpose or not. "Differently-abled" sounds wrong to me because 'abled' doesn't mean anything; we otherwise say 'capable' for the adjective or 'enabled' for the participle - one cannot 'able' someone. Moreover, the 'differently' aspect can seriously erase the lived realities of disability; one does not automatically get some kind of compensatory superpower for being disabled, like the comic-book character Daredevil. While I prefer "people with disabilities" to "disabled people", either is clearly an improvement over "the disabled", which gives too strong an impression of defining people solely by one aspect of their lives. AlexTiefling (talk) 22:56, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See Talk:Autism#"Autistic person" versus "person with autism" (version of 01:27, 12 May 2014).

—Wavelength (talk) 14:09, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See the archives of Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disability.

—Wavelength (talk) 14:12, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Interestingly, there is a movement within "the disabled community" to call "normal" people "not disabled yet". (Personally I wonder what happened to the phrase "chronically sick and disabled" - I find it a much better descriptor of such people than anything else I've come across.)--TammyMoet (talk) 08:26, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I expect that "not disabled yet" would be treated with all the seriousness it deserves, and would have a commensurate effect on donations. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:05, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There is also the possibility of completing the description by suggesting the statute of assisted or eligibility to being assisted. There remains drawbacks whatever the choice however. It will always be too restrictive for the one or the other, be they the ones directly concerned or otherwise undirectly concerned. --Askedonty (talk) 09:44, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to find source of quotation - Foot family (British politicians)

I'm trying to find something I seem to recall being said by Isaac Foot about his sons Hugh and Michael. It was on the lines of "Anyone can govern Cyprus, but writing a book is special". Any help much appreciated. DuncanHill (talk) 22:11, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Origin of law enforcement as a distinct occupation

When and were did the job of law enforcement first emerge as a distinct occupation - who were the first cops? I know that in the Roman Empire it was just one of the tasks of soldiers to arrest criminals. Then my knowlege has a looooooooooong gap up to the nineteenth century when sherrifs, peelers, bobbies, etc were already well established as the professional catchers of the crooked. I'm not at all convinced that the Sherrif of Nottingham's suposed single-minded pursuit of Robin the Hoodlum and his gang, some time during the Dark Ages/Early Medieval era, is based on historical reality. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 22:54, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Robin Hood is a legendary, rather than historical, figure. But are you saying you just don't believe in actual medieval sheriffs, even though they existed? AlexTiefling (talk) 22:58, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The role of Medieval English sheriff was more like a modern magistrate or even a mayor or civil administrator than that of police officer. There was only one sheriff per jurisdiction, not dozens of them patrolling the streets rounding up drunks and catching burglars. Criminals of that time met the sheriff in court where he was the judge, not the person who physically caught them. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 23:06, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Fair enough. A full answer to your question would be different depending on where in the very varied medieval world you were considering. But it's my understanding that in London, for example, there was a volunteer watch during the late middle ages and Renaissance - very much on an ad hoc basis, people would either serve as watchmen themselves or pay someone else to do so, but there was no central organisation. Sheriffs would have been responsible for ensuring criminals were captured if they wanted to be able to try them, but they'd have used their authority to get the citizenry to round up the accused, rather than going off and trying to do it themselves. Eventually - to continue the London example - the Bow Street Runners emerged, to serve the court of the same name, which led into the more widespread forces you've already mentioned. AlexTiefling (talk) 23:12, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(ec) The sheriff was responsible for raising the power of the county (see, I hope, Posse comitatus (common law)), to round up wanted people. DuncanHill (talk) 23:14, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

(edit conflict × 2)The Sheriff (or Shire-reeve) of Nottingham's main job would have mostly been settling property disputes, like making sure that people didn't plant too close to the edge of their property so as not to use of their neighbor's fertilizer. The High-reeve was allowed to also organize a state-sponsored mob that wasn't quite an army (or "deputies").

The history section of the Police article gives a good overview on who the first cops (after the Roman vigilantes) were. In the early medieval era, the peace was more or less kept by civilian vigilante mobs tempered by institutions that we could call lawsuits, such as weregild. There were also usually some watchmen whose main job was to watch out for invading forces, but eventually rulers figured "might as well have them watch for criminals as well." Louis XIV of France appears to be the first to actually have these guys become a clearly designated police force whose job was merely to keep the peace, not war (prior instances being soldiers who also policed areas). Ian.thomson (talk) 23:16, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Lictor, constable, gendarmerie & standing army. μηδείς (talk) 04:51, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In crusader Jerusalem (to give an extremely specific example...), viscounts had the duty of patrolling a city at night and rounding up criminals - or at least, one viscount is known to have had these duties, in Acre in the thirteenth century. I don't think this was a typical duty of viscounts in Europe, rather it was probably adopted from the duties of Islamic officials. Islamic terms for the person with these duties could vary, but a typical one was "shihna". Otherwise, in Jerusalem as in Europe, there was no police force, criminals were expected to be caught and brought to the court by their victims (or relatives of the victims). Adam Bishop (talk) 09:24, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In medieval times, the noble classes (and sometimes merchants and gentry who could afford them) had retainers (bands of armed thugs) that served various purposes, including arresting people whom they deemed to have wronged them, for later trial in courts. --Jayron32 10:49, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks everyone, lots of good info and links to follow up. Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 17:49, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Chinese history / fiction question

I am currently researching a 17-century daoyin manual that references supernatural feats of strength from Chinese history and fiction. It references Xiang Yu lifting the 1,000 cattie tripod and Wu Song killing the tiger. The version of the manual I have states that those who practice the exercise will be able to behead or pierce the side of an ox with the bare hand. Does this sound familiar to anyone? I honestly can't think of any historical or fictional source I've read mentioning this. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 23:41, 14 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what question you are asking. If it's about the history, the source for Xiang Yu's story is Sima Qian, who lived only 100 years afterwards. If it's about piercing oxen, Mas Oyama was famous for being able to kill an ox with his bare hands. Shii (tock) 02:37, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not asking about the source of Xiang Yu's feat of strength. I wouldn't have mentioned it if I didn't already know it. It's the same thing for Wu Song. I'm asking if anyone has ever come across an instance of a person in Chinese history--which rules out Mas Oyama--or fiction who kills an ox in the manner described above. The aforementioned manual basically claims those who practice it will gain super strength. I realize this is bullocks, I'm just trying to trace all of the allusions to historical or fictional characters. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 05:01, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That which you did there, I see it. —Tamfang (talk) 07:35, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I just read Romance of Three Kingdoms and I didn't see any story like that. Shii (tock) 14:15, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That narrows it down a bit. If it's not in Three Kingdoms or the Water Margin, the claim may have been something the author just made up instead of pulling from some cultural source. Thanks. --Ghostexorcist (talk) 02:23, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

This makes me think of 隔山打牛, which is fictional.--The Emperor's New Spy (talk) 04:17, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 15

why does being Jewish descent mean only through one's Jewish mother and not father?

Very puzzling............. Venustar84 (talk) 08:23, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

See Who is a Jew?#Jewish by birth, the Bible quotes cited there, and Mater semper certa est. (And I assume you mean descent, not decent.) Pais (talk) 08:33, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's really nothing puzzling about it. The premise is that you know who the mother is, but you might not know for sure who the father is. Keep in mind that tradition was established long before DNA tests, or blood tests for that matter. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:38, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

There's 2³² DNA letters and all humans have the same 99% If a Jew settled in China, she would immediately be mobbed by suitors. If this happened by ~1361 AD, after 653 years you could now have an all-Han relatives bar mitzvah with Mandarin chatter headed by a white rabbi without the boy having a single converted ancestor or chromosome piece that came from a Jew. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 12:34, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

You lost me at the bakery. However, you did remind me of the old "Two Jews get off a streetcar" story. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:54, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

And you reminded me of Mrs. Schmigelsky's baby boy again. The paternal owlishness is clearer than the Jewishness. InedibleHulk (talk) 13:28, May 15, 2014 (UTC)

I still haven't seen a valid reference. Although they killed him off in last week's episode, so maybe it's no longer relevant. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:05, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Did SMW inadvertantly recount the origin story of the Kaifeng Jews without meaning to? The small text makes it seem like his statement is in jest, and if so, perhaps he should read about the Kaifeng Jews... --Jayron32 14:43, 15 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

May 16

US President Impeachments

I was shuffling through some dusty digital archive of American history and I found some sort of ticket to the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson. That got me wondering, was this common practice back then, selling tickets to prominent court cases? If so, when did it stop? Many thanks, cheers ~Helicopter Llama~ 00:56, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Did the ticket have a price on it? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:18, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think so (copies can be found all over the web). See, for example, the United States' Senate website: " Popular interest in the trial was so intense that the Senate, for the first time in its history, issued gallery passes, beginning a practice that continues to the present." (See also "Display of Gallery Passes 1890 to Present"). ---Sluzzelin talk 01:30, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

They may not have been sold, but instead awarded based on a lottery or given out as favors to prominent friends of senators and the like (or a combination thereof). The main reason to use tickets is for crowd control. It isn't necessarily a means to raise money by selling them. --Jayron32 11:12, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the first attempt was agaist John Tyler, but there was nothing found for an impeachment trial (so the trial never started). As far as I know, these were the only attempts in the 19th century. --78.50.203.183 (talk) 18:15, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Oldest recorded voice of a president

Which US president was the first, whose voice was recorded? As far as I know, McKinley was the first to be filmed. But the first voice recording? Theodore Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson? I never heard a presidential voice before FDR and Hoover. --78.50.203.183 (talk) 18:13, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Benjamin Harrison (see section I linked to) in 1889. ---Sluzzelin talk 18:24, 16 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]