Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2016 January 13

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January 13

Why did the Japanese decide to do this?

According to Kyū-Shirataki_Station#History (see source 3), they didn't want to close a concrete train station because one high-school girl needs the station to go to school. Couldn't they have found an alternative solution? For example, buy the girl a bike, or let a school bus take her?--Scicurious (talk) 00:10, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

In theory, sure. If you read the reference, it seems to come down simply to this: they kept the train running because they'd agreed to carry the students some time earlier. Now there's only one, but they're keeping to that promise - until March when she graduates. Leaving aside the chance that some people do things because they made an agreement and they prefer to keep their word, it could come down to bureaucracy. You lay off the related train personnel or trim back their hours and give yourself labour troubles only to find that, although you've saved the division thousands, there isn't $100 available to buy a bike or whatever. Or maybe they didn't have a bus driver available. Bureaucracies paint themselves into all kinds of weird corners, though they don't usually result in as much appreciation as this one seems to have done: “Why should I not want to die for a country like this when the government is ready to go an extra mile just for me,” one commenter wrote on CCTV’s Facebook page. “This is the meaning of good governance penetrating right to the grassroot level. Every citizen matters. No Child left behind!” Matt Deres (talk) 03:39, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, bureaucracies do some rather bizarre things. When I was in elementary school, they had too many bus drivers and not enough crossing guards, so rather than have a crossing guard, we had a bus pick up us on one side of the street then pull into the parking lot in the school on the other side and drop us off. Obviously not very efficient and only makes sense when you consider the labor contracts they were forced to comply with. StuRat (talk) 04:54, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I don't know about the situation in Japan, but in the UK it's very difficult to actually close a railway station or railway line, and the usual procedure is to keep them nominally open but only run one train a week at inconvenient times - see Parliamentary train. Tevildo (talk) 09:00, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The ref used is potentially misleading. If you follow one of the refs it cites [1], it suggests there are actually 10 students who use the station and it doesn't sound like the timetable is specifically set for the students. Note also the station itself is unstaffed (per our article) and while several stations are being closed, I don't believe the line itself is from looking at Sekihoku Main Line and the refs. Nor does it look like any of these are terminal stations edit: or on branch lines.

So while there would be some scheduling changes (edit: which may encourage greater patronage) and cost savings from not having to stop at the these stations, the primary cost saving would likely be in maintenence of the buildings. Which is a complicated thing since it will depend on the building condition, whether something happens to go wrong etc. Edit: In the long term you could come up with an average, but we're talking 3 stations and so you may need a fairly long time before average is meaningful. Also complicated by the fact you could potentially turn the station in to a simple platform. In other words, while it's very unlikely keeping the station open for 10 people is profitable, how much is actually going to be saved from closing it (and the other 2 or 3 stations) is unclear. I don't know whether there will be any staff let go.

Notably, as a rural area and considering we don't know how far the school is (AFAIK) but it may be 10km+ (based on the station distances on that line), I'm not sure that running a bus to pick them up is going to be cheaper than simply stopping that train at an existing station along a route it's already going along. Particularly since we don't know if there is even an easy road route for the bus. Bicycles may be cheaper but I'm not sure cycling potentially 10km or even 20km or more sometimes in the snow over whatever tracks or roads exist would be considered acceptable to all. P.S. It's unclear to me that the closure was based on any agreement to keep the station open for students.

Nil Einne (talk) 12:54, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

In fact, reading a bit more in the comments, I'm even less sure that the closure was in any way timed for students. First remembering it sounds like there are 10 students who use it, I'm not sure they are all graduating. It sounds like a request was made to keep it open for students and perhaps they did keep it open for a while, but it's being closed in March however that affects students. March is both the end of fiscal year of the railway company and the school term so some people may graduate then, but these may not be related (other than they may coincide for historical reasons). Nil Einne (talk) 13:01, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

This story [2] however claims she is the only one to use the station, the other students board from earlier (or I guess later) stations edit: perhaps including the other ones being closed. It mentions something about her parents driving her once, but not how long it took. The school is Hokkaido Engaru Highschool so she probably gets off along with other students at Engaru Station. Our article suggests the train travels ~32 km. Whether the road route (or any good cycle route) is shorter or longer I don't know. I suspect it would be more efficient to travel to Shirataki Station which from what I can tell isn't being closed. In fact, that source suggests there are already more services which stop there (however the next one is too late to reach the school). It means anyone who wants to go to Engaru has to travel in the wrong direction to get to that station, but can't be helped. Nil Einne (talk) 13:20, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Creative commons license of government home pages

I am surprised to see that the website http://www.kremlin.ru/ says that "all material on the site is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International". Are there any other government home pages that have this license? Not whitehouse.gov, and List of major Creative Commons licensed works does not list any (other than kremlin.ru, which I'm adding right now). — Sebastian 02:36, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

See [3] found with a search for 'government usage creative commons'. There are 2 listed for 4.0. It's possible or even likely some of those listed have moved to 4.0 (Kremlin is there but doesn't say 4.0) but it hasn't been updated. If you expand your limits, a bunch use older versions and some also include the SA requirement. (Some are NC.) Nil Einne (talk) 16:59, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

BTW, I'm somewhat confused what you mean by "Not whitehouse.gov". If you mean you want a list of government homepages with the CC licences besides kremlin.ru and whitehouse.gov I guess you have that now.

If you mean whitehouse.gov doesn't use CC BY 4.0 then you're technically correct although bear in mind it probably mostly means that whoever in charge hasn't seen a reason to move to the newer version of the licence yet. Whitehouse.gov does use CC BY 3.0 [4] [5] although it only applies to stuff which isn't already in the public domain due to being produced by the US federal government.

While the international applicability and lack of ports in 4.0 is a good thing, governments tend to be slow and of course the US government has less reason to care about the issue. The grand of other rights issue is more controversial, but I'm not sure it really matters in the US anyway or that it really arises so much with government works. In the end, it's unlikely the slow movement is because they are opposed to the ideas of 4.0 even if it may be unfortunate for feel they are better. It's not like we moved to 4.0.

Nil Einne (talk) 17:21, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Thank you, Nil! I edited the CC license article accordingly. Never mind about whitehouse.gov; I just had overlooked their copyright information. — Sebastian 23:07, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Hurst v. Florida

In NPR's story Supreme Court Strikes Down Florida's Death Penalty System on Tuesday's Hurst v. Florida decision, Nina Totenberg wrote, "since the state death penalty law was enacted in 1972, judges have disregarded the jury's advisory on some 300 occasions, imposing either the harsher penalty of death or the lesser penalty of life" but didn't say in what proportion of those occasions the judge imposed the harsher than recommended penalty. How could I find that out? -- ToE 03:34, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I have no idea. But it sounds like something that might have been quoted in the Supreme Court decision itself. Did you check there? I quickly scanned the Supreme Court decision. I did not find the numbers that Totenberg cites. I did find this: "No Florida trial court has overruled a jury ’s recommendation of a life sentence for more than 15 years."Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:13, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I found the following page: [6]. On that page, there are many links to many legal documents for this case. I assume that the statistics that Nina Totenberg cites must be found somewhere within these court briefs and documents. I did a quick scan, but could not find the relevant passages. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:13, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Check out this page: [7]. There is a graphic (third one down) entitled "How judges rule on jury recommendations" that analyses 296 Florida cases. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:32, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Here is a law review article that specifically addresses death-to-life judicial overrides in Florida and life-to-death judicial overrides in Florida: [8]. If you don't want to read all the text, there are several graphs and tables at the back pages. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 06:38, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. That 2011 MSU Law Review article (with its tables 3 and 4) was just the sort of thing I was looking for. It reports 166 Life-to-Death Overrides since '74 (mostly in the '70s and '80s, a few in the '90s, and none from '00 on) and 91 Death-to-Life Overrides since '74 (at a fairly steady rate except for a spike in the late '80s). That makes a total of 257 cases of override from '70 - '11. -- ToE 13:51, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

You're welcome. Yes, it was an interesting question. Which is why I did a little research to dig deeper. That MSU Law Review article is good. Of course, you realize that it is somewhat dated (5 years old). Nonetheless, many sources have stated that there have been no life-to-death overrides at all since 2000. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 19:12, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

"Accident of History"

The phrase "Accident of history" is known to many of us, is often used in addressing some of our questions here [9], and has decently high frequency in google books [10]. However, we have no WP page or even redirect. Can anyone recommend a suitable target article or section to redirect to? Failing that, can you point me to some sources that would be good enough to make a stub article? At a glance I only see dictionary pages that give this as an example phrase for a certain sense of "accident", and not any good RS explanations of what the phrase really means. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:44, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Coincidence? --Jayron32 20:45, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

"There are no coincidences, only the inevitable."  :) Dr Dima (talk) 21:43, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I think he's referring to or expanding on a comment at the language desk, about why some names have masculine and feminine versions, while others are only one or the other. "Randomness" would seem to be the underlying idea. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:50, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Yes, my current question was sparked by another, but I've been interested in the phrase much longer. The phrase, as commonly used, carries more meaning than "coincidence". Or at least I think it does. Like many terms in philosophy, it seems to stand for a good few sentences of reasoning, along the lines of how things could have been different, but as of a certain time, thing X was the way it is now, and momentum/resistance to change has kept it the way it is, and if there is any underlying reason, it is to be found in the past course of events, not in logical analysis.

I suppose that redirecting "accident of history" to "coincidence" may be better than nothing, but the phrase I'm asking about is not precisely synonymous with randomness or coincidence. We say a roll of dice is random, we don't say it's an accident of history (nor do we say it was a coincidence, though the term may technically apply in some contexts). We say that running into your friend at three different locations in the same day is a coincidence, not an accident of history. Likewise, the fact that USA drives on the right while UK drives on the left is not simply a coincidence or random, but an accident of history (please don't nitpick my example, I'm only trying to illustrate a distinction.) If you'd like other examples of use in the wild, search google books. Here's [11] an example I found where "randomness" or "coincidence" seem to fall short of conveying the right meaning. My impetus for making a stub or redirect is that I've found that the phrase is often balked at (that's my OR), and by the fact that /accident of history definition/ is a google auto complete. Performing such a google search is not that helpful [12]. It does bring up our article Historical particularism, which seems relevant, but it's not clear to me that redirecting AoH to that article would do more good than harm. Again, my point is that the phrase is often not understood, it is relatively common, and I think it would be nice to have an article on it. Hence my request for help finding references. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:20, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Maybe accidents of history are departures from historical determinism? Our article on that is, to my great surprise, just a stub. Loraof (talk) 23:00, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

• Arbitrariness? Arbitrary events are not random, but they are deliberate while lacking reason. For example, people all need to drive on the same side of the road, so choosing which side to drive on is deliberate (not random), but it is arbitrary (since neither side is preferential, but one side is preferential to both sides). --Jayron32 02:46, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

@Jayron32: I think that's the closest fit, thanks. I still think the phrase may deserve a stub, but lacking good refs I'll put in a redirect for now. SemanticMantis (talk) 16:21, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

People who write on the theory of history (possible redirect Category:Theories of history?) seem to use the term. Some possible references:

[13] defines it as "things happen and constrain what can happen next" - and suggests another possible redirect: Path dependence

[14], however, (1865)defines it as "events, which instead of being causes, are merely the occasions on which the real causes act."

[15] (too involved for me to understand, but the term does appear)

[16] (can be requested at Wikipedia:WikiProject Resource Exchange/Resource Request if you don't have a New York Times subscription) (1880) defines it as "great events that have sprung from little causes". Causality? 184.147.121.46 (talk) 16:08, 14 January 2016 (UTC) (reposted by SemanticMantis (talk) 16:52, 14 January 2016 (UTC))

May I suggest that if there is to be a new page -- not a redirect -- for "accident of history", it take Guns, Germs, and Steel as one of its prime examples. I can't recall if Jared Diamond uses the phrase itself in his book. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 15:38, 18 January 2016 (UTC)

Does the Koran say something about blond women?

According to a ton of sites, yes. Just need confirmation.--Scicurious (talk) 19:40, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I searched this English translation of the Quran and couldn't find anything for either "blonde" or other possible equivalents I could think of ("yellow", "fair") in connection with womean (except in the case of the houris). Which doesn't necessarily mean that those site are making things up (although some very well might). But they might be confused between the Quran and other Islamic sources (hadith, sira, tafsir, etc.) When I get a round tooit I'll try to do a search on the Arabic text. Contact Basemetal here 20:29, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Could you give some examples of which sites say that? That might help us answer your question better. - Lindert (talk) 20:41, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

I'd rather not advertise them. But any Google search can yield many leads. --Scicurious (talk) 21:20, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

The only thing I can find is a CNN article that links Der Spiegel which says that someone posted this claim on PI-News. It sounded like it was just a user who commented there. Hardly news-worthy I'd say and anything but reliable. I've read the Quran and don't remember anything like that. If there's a verse of the Quran cited, go check it out; if not, I wouldn't take the claim seriously. - Lindert (talk) 21:58, 13 January 2016 (UTC)