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October 12

OneDrive

I uploaded a ton of files off my Windows 10 PC to transfer to my Windows 11 PC, but I can only see them on the former. Wazzup? Clarityfiend (talk) 07:09, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

You should check if you use the same Microsoft account. Ruslik_Zero 12:11, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

I checked in Settings. It says both of my PCs are registered, plus it shows most of my free 5 GB is used up. However, when I log into OneDrive, it says almost all of that space is free. Clarityfiend (talk) 22:28, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Can high memory usage make the Internet not work?

My phone company had a lot of problems on October 6 and 7. A man came to my house and got them fixed, or so I thought. For the third time in two days, someone from tech support was able to fix the problems remotely. There are still occasional brief outages, lasting a few seconds. But one of them stopped when I heard my computer "turn on". What I believe it is doing is storing information to clear more memory. Maybe that was a coincidence, but McAfee keeps telling me they can solve the memory problem if I pay them even more.

Windows 11, Microsoft Edge. What other details do you need and how do I provide them?— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 18:59, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

• What do the phone company's problems have to do with anything you can fix?
• What was fixed at your house?
• What was fixed remotely?
• What do you mean by "turn on", in quotes, and why did you say heard, not saw?
• What changed at that point?
• Do you think McAfee might possibly be ripping you off like a bunch of scammers?

 Card Zero  (talk) 02:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Is it all right if I number the questions even if they weren't numbered?

1. I was just saying it may be their problem since I had some more serious problems earlier.

2. He didn't tell me. He didn't even have to come inside. He just told me it was fixed and asked me to go to the Internet on my computer and it was fine.

3. Don't know. Do you actually think tech support gives us details? He did have to put me on hold and my Internet went out while he was doing it.

4. There's no message on the screen. All I know is the computer occasionally makes a noise that sounds like something turning on.

5. The Internet outage resolved itself, but that could be a coincidence.

6. Could be. I should have asked for help with the specific problem when I called them to tell me the scan wasn't working. He told me he was uninstalling and reinstalling their software because there were problems on their end.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:31, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

• In general, especially for later versions of Windows like 11, high memory usage (RAM) is not necessarily a problem: and this is very probably not connected to any internet problems you may be having.
• Were you aware of high 'memory' usage before the problem with the internet?
• How much RAM is installed (often 4 or 8 GB)? How big is your hard drive/SSD?
• Was there a time when everything (ie PC/laptop and internet) was working properly? What changed?
• To repeat, was anything changed just before you started having problems?
• How do you know that your internet connection is dropping out for only a few seconds? Are your router's lights flashing or often changing colour? Are you streaming or playing games online?
• You said: "I believe it [what] is doing is storing information to clear more memory." I'm afraid this is nonsense. Are you confusing disk space (hard drive) used for data storage, with RAM for temporarily executing programs? Lots of people call them both "memory", but they are very different.
• Did you install McAffee to try to fix the problem, or did it come installed with the PC? Has McAffee been telling you, unprompted, that you have problems?
• McAffee is simply horrendous bloatware and always has been. I'd rather stick red-hot needles in my eyes rather than use it.
• Try using Windows Task Manager to see whether the CPU or RAM are affected - generally, the lower the levels in the graphs, the better.
• Are you using Wi-Fi, or a wired (network cable) connection?
• For low disk space, try Disk cleanup in Windows from M$.
• Can you take the PC to someone else's house (or a free wi-fi spot) and use their internet connection, and see if you still get the same problems?
• If this all sounds too technical, I would find a local PC shop or roving Windows techie who does home visits, it shouldn't take more than an hour for someone who knows what they're doing to fix your PC problems, and they should also be able to at least have a look at your internet connection and tell at a glance what's wrong. Trying to sort you out here on the help desk is unlikely to lead to positive results. MinorProphet (talk) 11:25, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Again, I'm going to number the questions.

1. Yes, because I get "High memory usage" messages in the upper right corner of the screen. I think this answers my question but I wanted to make sure.

2. I did ask how to get this information so I could tell you.

3. It usually does. Several weeks ago there were a lot of brief outages, and it happened again a week ago. There have been brief outages at times for weeks, though they stopped for about a week after the first big fix (which to my knowledge was nothing more than unplugging the modem). Someone was supposed to come to my house but to my knowledge they didn't. Unplugging the modem and plugging it back in was all that I did. I don't recall anything being fixed. I do know when there was a problem months ago they checked and said my Fiber box needed to be turned off and turned on, or something like that. I asked them to correct their information because I was told they couldn't give me fiber service.

4. McAfee had a problem with scans as I said above and their software was reinstalled. I don't recall if that was before the first Internet problem.

5. Listening to music, and it stops, or if it hasn't stopped whatever else I am doing is going really slow and finally I get a message about not being able to find the DNS. If the problem lasts long enough I get "You're not connected" on the screen.

6. It may be nonsense but I'm explaining it as best I know how. I think my computer goes faster after this sound is heard.

7 and 8. I needed virus protection and I got it. It was probably installed with the PC but it has been reinstalled as I said.

9. I'll see what that tells me.

10. Cable.

11. Done. It said I gained 61.2 MB. I did it with a few more categories after I made sure I wanted to and it gave me more space but I didn't see how much. It wasn't much.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:31, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

12. I get messages about risky connections (I think these are ads but blocking ads causes its own problems) and there's someone who can fix problems.

13. Don't think any of this is necessary. The brief outages don't usually happen that often.

14. Trying to avoid this. The man from the phone compny should have finished all that.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:31, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Overhead light dimmed briefly and the music stopped. Something on my screen got blurry and it took a while to get a clear imnage. But that didn't last long enough to really cause a problem.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 19:50, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

1. It would seem that the memory problem is separate from the internet difficulties. To find the amount of RAM etc., click Start/press Windows key, type System Information and select it. In the r.h. pane it should tell you the Windows version, System Model, Processor, and towards the end, Installed Physical Memory. Click and copy each of these in turn using Ctrl-C.

2. Where are the "low memory" messages coming from? What happens if you click on one? Write down as much info as you can.

3. It appears that you have a standard cable modem (typically useless article), with a physical wired connection from the modem to the computer. If you are getting messages about not being to find the DNS (Domain Name Service, which turns IP addresses into URLs), this means that the modem is losing the connection to your internet supplier. This is almost certainly their problem. On the other hand, this is a relatively technical message which a user shouldn't be getting: normally a browser will just say something like "We're having a problem finding that site, please try again." What process or app is giving this message?

4. What sort of broadband speeds are you getting? Try fast.com for example. MinorProphet (talk) 01:10, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

So brief power outages are causing the modem to restart, cutting your streaming connection, maybe?  Card Zero  (talk) 06:13, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

1. It won't let me copy. 10.0.22631 8.0 GB installed physical memory, 1.99 GB available, 13.1 GB virtual memory, 5.2 GB available.

2. Upper right corner of screen, don't think it lets me click on it. Happened only twice yesterday.

3. Don't get Internet from cable company. Messages get cutesy like "It's not the same without you." Light dimming doesn't usually happen.

4. fast.com gives me 6.4 Mbps. Phone company says 10.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 16:27, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

This (old, 2016) superuser question/answer says it's all about something called commit charge, which is to do with applications claiming they might need a large amount of memory. Also, memory paging, a form of "storing information to clear more memory", is not nonsense, although it's surprising that there's any call for it when you've got 8 GB. I remain suspicious about McAfee: possibly it's taking (or claiming a potential future use for) most of your memory. To be fair, we don't know what other possible culprits you have installed and running.  Card Zero  (talk) 18:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The high memory usage message appeared and you can click on it. It had a list of things I could do but the problem is I need all the activities that are going on, so I can't say "sleep". There is a power efficiency mode but I am reluctant to try it. I can click and get a list of other performance options but my guess is clicking on that would just add to the problem, temporarily.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 20:21, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for the tech details. I still have no idea how you are getting messages about DNS, it's several layers of complexity further down than any normal user should ever concern themselves with. I used to get paid to do this, and you would have been an ideal customer. I suggest you just need someone to stand over you in real time, to explain what's going on in layman's terms, and make constructive suggestions/tell you what to do/fix it for you. Unfortunately, we are unlikely to be able do this on the Ref Desk. I reckon your PC hardware is fine, but your dodgy internet connection is stone age (no fault of yours), and your operating system appears to be in a bit of a mess, for whatever reason. I suggest you seek professional help. Personally, to save time and frustration for all concerned, I would recommend that you back up all your data in at least three places, plus write down all your browser usernames and passwords on paper, format your hard disk (or buy a new one), make a new install of Windows 10 <M$ fanboys wail and recoil in horror> and start all over again. MinorProphet (talk) 12:07, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I have 11, but not by choice. Windows 10 remains in substantially greater use. I hope you aren't seriously suggesting triple backups, making one is effort enough.  Card Zero  (talk) 14:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I still get messages from Comics Kingdom saying connectivity issues were detected when I tried to load comments but things are working much better now. I asked for advice on another site and they said download Malwarebytes so I have a free trial, and they recommended some other steps. No problem files were found with scans but another fix they recommended did find corrupt files and fix them. One site is still having problems but overall things are working better now and I've had no actual Internet outages except when I turned the computer on. Something about walking across the area where my modem is makes it stop working, especially if I pause nearby.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 22:31, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Gocomics is having serious problems but I fixed the major problem I had with the Internet by unplugging the modem. It took several tries for it to come back, and by that I mean I watched the lights to see if the one light finally turned green and stopped blinking.— Vchimpanzee • talk • contributions • 23:41, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

1. I would suggest that the "thing turning on" is probably a fan, though it could be hard drive if you still have one of those (and replacing that with an SSD is a relatively cheap and good upgrade). If your processor is getting hot, cooling may indeed allow it to speed up, although it should preferably start cooling before it throttles due to heat. Similarly if your system is paging "junk" to disk, that may speed up by freeing actual RAM.
2. Be sure you are talking to who you think you are on the phone (or Internet).

All the best: Rich Farmbrough 19:55, 18 October 2024 (UTC).

Also I highly recommend uninstalling McAfee, as the guy himself, McAfee, told people to do years ago. (He sold it a long time ago, now owned by some predatory corporation. Also the guy is dead now he had some...issues, but that's a whole other topic) It's quite possible some of your problems are caused by it, attemping to be "helpful" and tracking and filtering all your Internet traffic (sucking up lots of your system's resources in the process) and mucking about with Windows settings. Windows comes with anti-malware stuff included no extra cost (Microsoft Defender) these days which is plenty fine for the typical individual. --Slowking Man (talk) 02:49, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 15

PowerShell: Is it possible to "unformat" the disk, i.e. to undo the last action that has just formatted the disk, in PowerShell?

HOTmag (talk) 07:28, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

For what any normal user clearly wants, the answer is simply no. There isn't. But, depending on the method of formatting (there are many possibilities available when using Powershell), it is possible that all of the data is still on the disk and can be extracted. It won't be unformatted though. It will be a dump of locatable files left on the disk. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 12:32, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Business economic

i require mathematics and associated document for financial pour process address Lance that regular necessary media literacy 41.113.138.138 (talk) 10:37, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but your post makes no sense in English. Perhaps you could get a person (not an online computer translator program) who is bilingual in English and your language (French??) to translate it for you. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 04:05, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

More likely isiZulu.  --Lambiam 08:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Article does not appear in Google search.

Natasha Hausdorff

Even though it is on Wikipedia 184.153.21.19 (talk) 21:54, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The page was not patrolled, and per Controlling search engine indexing new pages that are not patrolled don't get indexed for the first 90 days. I've patrolled it now, so it will be indexed whenever Google crawls next (it may take a day or so). Pinguinn 🐧 23:33, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Perhaps soon:) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 184.153.21.19 (talk) 22:05, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

It's on Google now, though it's on page 2 and not on the knowledge panel. Those things probably take longer. Pinguinn 🐧 09:46, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 16

Lost Icon for Google Chrome

On my Samsung Galaxy A15, the icon for Google Chrome has disappeared from my screen. I may have accidentally deleted the icon. It is still installed. If I have launched it, I can switch to it, and on starting up my phone, I can open it by going through the Apps listing in the Settings, but I would like to have an icon for it. How do I put an icon back on the desktop of an Android phone when the app is installed but doesn't have an icon? Robert McClenon (talk) 02:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

There are multiple choices for the home screen on Samsung Galaxy phones. Every home screen setup is different. In some, you long-hold the icon in the apps list until the home screen appears and then drag/drop it where you want it. In others, you long-hold the background of the home screen, then select a location, and select an app to drop on that location. There are other methods for other home screens. If you can state what you are using, it is easier to give specific instructions. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 13:23, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Bitcoin friendlies needed

Disclaimer: I have $41,000 CAD in 20:1 leverage forex trading accounts and 0.3 bitcoin in a wallets.

This issue was brought up in an online bitcoin group: Talk:CNBC#2024_AFF_Bitcoin_Coverup. Somebody moved 29,000 government bitcoin two days after Trump's July 27/2024 speech to Hodl all coins.

The 230,000 bitcoin should be on the books of the Assets Forfeiture Fund. The last fiscal year for the fund was Sept 30/24. The 2023 audit seems to have been published January/2024. https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/reports/24-018_0.pdf From page 1: "KPMG reported one significant deficiency in the FY 2023 Independent Auditors’ Report, noting that improvements are needed in controls over seized property and forfeiture revenue."

Sovereign_immunity_in_the_United_States#Actions_taken_in_bad_faith "Typically if a party can demonstrate that the government intentionally acted wrongly with the sole purpose of causing damages, that party can recover for injury or economic losses."

Many in the bitcoin world are wondering who and why those with access crashed the bitcoin price, and more so, why there is no mainstream media coverage. CNBC has been pressured to at least state they will investigate. It has been reported to the FBI as either misuse for financial gain, or election tampering. A report was also filed with the Office of Inspector General (United States) which is "...charged with identifying, auditing, and investigating fraud, waste, abuse, embezzlement and mismanagement of any kind within the executive department.

The main question is: If mainstream media doesn't expose it, the FBI and the Office of Inspector General don't act, then what would be a good recourse?

References

Music Air BB (talk) 06:57, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I must confess I understand nothing or very little of the above, but am nevertheless fairly sure that your main question is not about computing, information technology, electronics, software, or hardware. Also note that we cannot offer legal advice. If you believe you have been wronged, perhaps you should talk to a lawyer. If a whole class of people has been wronged, there is such a thing as class action. A competent lawyer should be able to determine whether this is appropriate in this case.  --Lambiam 15:58, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Cryptocurrency is a speculative investment, and is designed to be non-transparent, and to make it difficult to trace. This also makes it difficult to trace the actions of other investors that might have influenced the price. One reason why mainstream media do not report on the fluctuations in the value of cryptocurrency is that they know that it is a speculative non-transparent investment that is difficult to understand and more difficult to report on. Robert McClenon (talk) 18:26, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

The US government wallets are transparent. https://www.arkhamintelligence.com/ reported it on x, with the transactions records from the blockchain. They did the same with the German state of Saxony when they crashed the price with a very retarded move. Anyone with access to the Assets Forfeiture Fund should have known that their hoard is large enough to crash the price with any hint of movement. I can picture some fool on that fateful Monday setting up a transfer, checking their plan with the small test bit, then WHAM! lets see if A: I have the power, B: My power over the hoard can move the price, C: Will I be held to task on it, D: Will I have 15 minutes of fame hit main stream media and make me infamous. E: etc. One person could have done it, or a group decision, and both would benefit in many ways. My main query is why are only crypto groups concerned about blinded Americans that allow this blatant wrong to happen without asking why and what should the consequences be. I will contact large groups of lawyers like the Republican National Lawyers Association and its Dem equal; BlackRock legals, Microstrategy legals, etc. I could go on to list many more notable groups that would champion this. The reason I posted on this desk is for intelligent and politically neutral input.Music Air BB (talk) 00:34, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I'll let you judge whether my input is "intelligent" or not: Most people who took Bitcoin seriously at the beginning, continue to do so with the sober realisation that people, corporations, and states, are free to manipulate the price and do so very regularly - up and down, up and down. The premise of the distributed ledger is that code is law. That said, as you pointed out, real law still exists and people can still be prosecuted for theft, misappropriation, etc. even if the code allowed them to. However, they act in the same global anarchy that allowed things like the plunder of Iraq.

Because of that, and the fact that it would be difficult to actually attribute, in a court, the price movement to the suggested causes, I think the effect of legal action would be tepid. Maybe the same energy should be focused on making sure the government in question, is more transparent in the future about why it issues cryptocurrency transactions, each time it does. Komonzia (talk) 21:04, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Microsoft Access Database Sharing and Lockout

I have four Microsoft Access databases on my Windows 11 desktop computer, and have sharing set up with my Windows 11 laptop computer. After I had been using one of the databases on my laptop computer, I went to my desktop computer and tried to open it. I got the message: Microsoft Access The database has been placed in a state by user 'Admin' on machine 'GANESHA' that prevents it from being opened or locked.

That obviously means that the laptop computer (and my computers have mythological names) has locked the database for exclusive use. I walked over to the laptop computer and closed the database. I have had the databases open by Access on both the desktop computer and the laptop computer at the same time in the past without a locking conflict. So my questions are, first, what actions that I do on one computer will cause it to lock the database exclusively so that the other computer cannot open it? Second, once this happens, is there anything that I can to unlock it other than closing the database? (I know that isn't difficult when the computers are in adjoining rooms. I know. I know.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:28, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

Search field is tiny and auto suggestions not working

This morning my browser (Chrome) crashed for some unknown reason. I reinstalled it and everything in every application is behaving normally, except here on Wikipedia, the "Search Wikipedia" field in the upper right corner on the Legacy Vector skin is very small now. The field for entering categories on WP:HotCat are also small now. The edit window however and the subject field above this edit window I'm typing in now, are all normal.

Also when adding edit summaries the "auto-suggestion" (not sure the correct term?) does not work at all now. When I start typing, there is no suggestion filling in from previously typed edit summaries. It's not just the old one were lost, new ones are not being regenerated.

As far as I can tell, these problems seem to be only happening on Wikipedia. Search fields on other websites I checked seem to function and look normal. For example, on YouTube, my previous searches start popping up as soon as I start typing, just like it always has.

My laptop (MacBook) I don't even remember how old it is now; well, I've already bought a new one. So if this is not an easy fix, I'm ditching this ancient machine. --DB1729^talk 00:04, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Some questions to help understand/resolve the issue:

• Do you have any Chrome extensions, what are they?
  • Try making a brand new Chrome profile, see here for steps: https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2364824 -- Don't sync it with any Google account. The new profile would normally have separate settings and extensions to your main one.
  • Try Wikipedia as an anonymous IP editor on your fresh profile, test the issue, then log in, test the issue again.
  • If the issue doesn't happen at all, it was probably a setting in Chrome or an extension you had. Even if you reinstall Chrome, some settings may have been left behind or sync'd from Google.
  • If the issue only happens after you log into Wikipedia on your fresh test profile, that means it's something related to your Wikipedia settings, such as your skin or scripts.
• If that doesn't help, can you post a screenshot of the issue? You can use imgur or imgbb or some other service you already know.

Regarding MacBooks - you could consider putting Linux on the older MacBook if it is out of support (apparently they support them for 7 years), to get some more use out of it without disposing of it. Komonzia (talk) 18:26, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 18

Removing a tab-related toolbar from Firefox

I have used Firefox on Linux for years, and I hate tabs and never deliberately use them. Previously I set up a userChrome.css file with

  #tabbrowser-tabs { visibility: collapse !important; }

to eliminate the toolbar that displays open tabs even if I only have one of them. But now that I have Firefox 131, I find a new tab-related toolbar taking up space. Specifically, at the top of my Firefox window I see a title bar (good); then a menu bar with File, Edit, etc. (good); then this new toolbar; and then the location bar (good). The new toolbar contains nothing but a single icon, and hovering over this produces the explanation "List all tabs".

How can I get rid of this new toolbar? I tried using "Customize Toolbar" and dragging the one icon out of it, but this had no effect at all.

Thanks for your attention. --142.112.141.16 (talk) 05:42, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Does this Mozilla support thread help? It suggests #TabsToolbar-customization-target { visibility: collapse !important; }.  Card Zero  (talk) 14:39, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

That makes it go away even if I do have tabs (for example if I do Tools -> Add-Ons and Themes), but I can live with that. Thanks. --142.112.141.16 (talk) 07:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Disabling 2FA

I have 2fa enabled on my android smartphone and need to disable it on one phone and renewable it on a new phone. I have access to the authenticator on the old phone and have access to the codes . My old phone is dying and need to enable it on the new phone. Can someone help change it to the new phone? fr33kman 16:57, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Which authenticator app are you using? Depending on the generation method and the app in question, it might be possible to export the seeds used to generate the codes. Otherwise, you'll have to log in to each account (?) that has 2fa enabled and switch them over to your new phone individually. FifthFive (talk) 17:51, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 19

Unformat: Why doesn't Windows let undo the "format" (or "quick format") command, although it was possible in MS-DOS?

HOTmag (talk) 19:28, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

In DOS 6, if you were using a FAT formatted drive, the FORMAT /Q command would not actually format the disk. It would copy the file allocation table to an unused area of the disk and replace it with an empty file allocation table. As long as you don't use the drive at all, you can unformat the disk to copy the file allocation table back. When Windows 95 was released, the unformat command was dropped. At that time, and now, there are many data recovery tools available and the Windows mindset is to only go into areas where it can be "the" market. If there is too much competition, Microsoft puts effort into other things. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 19:55, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

As long as you don't use the drive at all, you can unformat the disk to copy the file allocation table back. Do you have any practical suggestion of undoing a "quick format" in Windows? HOTmag (talk) 20:54, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

(programmer here with some OS/FS knowledge) MS-DOS used FAT, a very rudimentary file system (as did microcomputer OSes generally at the time, when processing power and disk space were so limited). In that simple FS, there's just that allocation table, and...not much else. Simply copying an area of the disk to another is easy—I mean, that's a basic function a filesystem does whenever you copy a file. (PS this makes it easy for the FS to get trashed, potentially losing all your data, as happened to many people) Modern Windows uses NTFS, a more "modern", advanced, and thus complex FS (which also is much better at not losing your data and doing various advanced things like shadow copy, online backups, RAID distributed volume clusters etc etc).

There is no "file allocation table" in NTFS. Instead there's a "Master File Table" which is a relational database storing the fundamental info about the FS. But simply copying this is not enough to "restore" the FS if anything has been done to it in the meanwhile (The computer has no way of knowing whether or not this is the case. Note this was true of MS-DOS as well, it just played fast-and-loose with your data and decided if it thought it was fine "well, looks okay, you might wanna run chkdsk to be sure though")

The MFT does not store the location of all the data making up files in the FS. It only stores enough info to look up the "head nodes" of the B-tree graph data structure, which is how the data in the FS is organized. Looking up a file's data involves walking the graph structure to look up the clusters containing the file data. (These could even be on multiple different physical storage devices like in clustered volumes, frequently used in "enterprise computing". Remember when your bank lost all your money and account info because their hard drives crashed and they lost their data and their computer systems were offline for days? No?) Yeah this kind of stuff is the sort of stuff theoretical computer science is about—applied math such as graph theory is one big aspect of it.

All "modern FSes" (ext4, XFS, ZFS, btrfs, APFS etc) use various techniques and structures along these broad lines. Much faster, flexible and extensible, conserves space reliable all that jazz. But the tradeoff is more complexity. The MFT doesn't "know" itself where all the data is located for all the files (unlike the FAT in, well, FAT). It just has a "map" for how to get started looking up that stuff. But now imagine a bunch of that stuff is moved without the MFT being updated about it. Now you have to basically go through the entire FS checking that it's in a "consistent" state and repairing it if it isn't. And the computer has no idea whether or not this happened...so it has to do that regardless to be sure. And that's why things are a little more complicated than "just copy this one thing back and forth". Similarly, bringing an Airbus A380 back to "ready-to-fly" status after having it parked in a hangar for a while, is a little more involved than for a Cessna.

PS if you care at all about your data (if you would be upset if I deleted it right now then that means you care about it) back it up, frequently, to multiple places. Set up automatic backups, but periodically make manual ones too. Storage is so cheap these days there's no good excuse not to. If you have only one copy of something you reallt have zero copies of that something. You can't go back in time after you lose something and then make sure you saved it. (This doesn't have to be from hardware/software failure necessarily. "Are you SURE you want to overwrite this file?") --Slowking Man (talk) 03:49, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for this thorough answer. A bit disappointing one, though, because I haven't backed up my disk... But of course you deserve a barnstar for your professional reply.

To sum up, practically speaking, do you think you can suggest any advice to a user who wishes to undo a recent "quick format" she has carried out (in Windows OS), if nothing has been done to the disk for the time being? HOTmag (talk) 09:10, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Somehow this helped me understand why a partition on my disk was still accessible (sort of) the same after something started wiping it (it could be viewed and accessed from another partition after some attempts to restore the MFT) AND why trying to fix the MFT didn't fix the partition in question (it never booted again), even though we never figured out what was exactly wrong. Weird closure 10 to 12 years later. - Purplewowies (talk) 02:40, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Sure, this is a frequent one. (To save yourself time, just ask that to begin with, instead of for info about how you think you might go about doing a thing. Maybe that way will turn out to not be the best way to go about accomplishing the thing.)

Necessary pre-note: if these steps seem too complex and you're unconfident in your ability to follow them, and the data is anything you don't want to lose, the best course of action really is to find a professional and pay them to apply their expertise to your problem, sorry. If you needed to replace an electrical outlet or do an oil change on a vehicle, and didn't think you were capable of doing so correctly per instructions, you'd hire a professional to do it for you, right?

Expanding on Data recovery § Four phases of data recovery here. Ideal first steps:

1. If the drive is still plugged into anything, unplug the cables to the drive temporarily. If that can't be done kill the power to the entire thing the drive is in (with a "hard" shut down eg by holding down the power button or yanking the power cord from the wall, not something like hitting "Shut down" in Windows). Yes, trust me on this one. If the drive is still "seen" by a running computer system, that system might be doing things in the background to it you aren't even aware of, overwriting some of your precious data! Then the parts which got overwritten really are lost forever, sorry.
2. "Clone" the drive (or partition/volume) onto another physical device with disk cloning software. Making a copy. Clonezilla is nifty and simple and can be "livebooted" directly, but you'll need something like a USB flash drive and a running computer to copy Clonezilla to that USB drive. Diskgenius is powerful if you want something in a Windows environment though it's not the most user-friendly (geared towards "computer people"). Ideally do this multiple times to different devices! Further operations are done on this copy, so that the intact original master copy is still there safely untouched, to be gone back to if necessary.

The above steps really are the best things to do and not doing them is taking more risks with that data. (If you don't care about the data, why even bother trying to recover it to begin with? Other than for "fun"/self-educational experience perhaps.) You accept the risks if not following them, caveat emptor and all.

3. Fire up some data recovery software and point it at that copy of the disk or volume. DMDE, Recuva, MiniTool are some of the best ones w/ a Windows GUI. SystemRescue is great stuff, bootable Linux-based system. Photorec is good, command line interface however ...Hey, speaking of command line Microsoft released their own file recovery tool finally, good on them, like I said command line only.
4. Anything that stuff can't recover, is gone forever assuming there's no copy of it elsewhere, just as if something existed only as a single paper copy and then got chucked into a volcano. Software isn't magic, it's just instructions to a machine.

Final step: set up automatic backup of stuff you care about. Remote cloud storage is cheap these days. Ideally also make "physical backups" onto other storage devices. Set a schedule for yourself. (With a bit of work and resources you could also set up a "live" "backup appliance" server for yourself to do automatic backups in the background.) If you have physical objects precious to you, you likely do something like buy a safe or rent a safe deposit box for them right? Personal "cloud" recommendation: pCloud, Swiss company, great pricing and features. (Not a huge ad budget.) It's difficult to have too many copies of stuff you care about unless you get really crazy. --Slowking Man (talk) 18:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Ah, also, as the file recovery article mentions, if a file's data is merely partially overwritten but not fully, the not overwritten stuff often can be recovered. Difficulty: sometimes automated tools (like the ones mentioned) can handle it and that's all you need. But if it's absolutely necessary that every last byte which can be, is recovered, the real hard cases can require understanding the fine details of computer data and storage and file formats, binary or hexadecimal arithmetic, dropping into a hex editor and manually "bit-twiddling" to repair corrupted files all that fun exciting stuff. Familiar with the terms big-endian and little-endian? (Another thing pros can take care of, though the ones who do understand that stuff and do it well tend in the pricier direction. Need someone with a bit more expertise than a youngster with a laptop who knows how to pop open a copy of Acronis and click the buttons.) Slowking Man (talk) 18:26, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanksss, I will try it tomorrow. and will report the results. For the time being, I've only carried out the first step, because it seems to be the most urgent one. HOTmag (talk) 19:07, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

Debian version

I have a laptop that until an hour ago was running Debian 10 aka Buster, which is two versions before the current "Bookworm" release. I updated it to Debian 11 (Bullseye), rebooted, then updated the Bullseye to Bookworm. That seems to be working fine. But when I looked at the version numbers of all the installed programs, it sure looks to me like the Bookworm upgrade actually installed the current unstable/testing version aka Trixie. For example, typing "python3" says 3.11.2, and so on, per here.

Any idea what is going on? I'm less upset than I am puzzled. I thought that version updates of individual packages only was supposed to happen at new Debian releases.

Output of "uname -a" is:

Linux boxname 6.1.0-26-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.112-1 (2024-09-30) x86_64 GNU/Linux

I wrote "boxname" instead of the box's actual name. Also, /etc/debian_version says 12.7 which is what I expected. Thanks.

2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:8FFA (talk) 04:55, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I have recently upgraded to trixie and now have python 3.12. /etc/debian_version says trixie/sid. There are a number of inconsistencies in those release notes: bookworm was already at python 3.11, trixie now has gcc 14.2.0 and perl 5.28.2, both higher than what is stated on that web page. And uname gives 6.10.11-amd64. I think you are fine. --Wrongfilter (talk) 05:15, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, I might check when Bookworm was released, but I expected that back then, gcc, python3, etc. would be on earlier versions than what I see now in 12.7. Trixie Stable is probably some months a way so I plan to stay on Bookworm for now. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:8FFA (talk) 00:32, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

1-bit music

In the 1980s, Tim Follin created a lot of 1-bit music. It can be heard here.

Our chiptune article lacks technical details. Though 8-bit music redirects there, the meaning isn't explained. Presumably each sample has an amplitude from 0 to 255. That characteristic alone wouldn't cause music to sound very distinctive, though, just low-quality, so perhaps "chiptune" is indeed a better name.

But anyway that isn't 1-bit music. I presume that in 1-bit music, each sample has 1 bit and thus is either fully on or fully off. This could produce square waves of different frequencies, and by mixing them, chords.

What puzzles me is how Tim Follin apparently modulates amplitude. For instance, the piece "Agent X 2" (the music for the game Agent X II: The Mad Prof's Back, and apparently the only good thing about it) ends with a fade out. How is that possible?  Card Zero  (talk) 06:57, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

On an original Spectrum, all one could do is turn on and off a single (rather inertial) output line. Exploiting that inertia, one could turn the relevant control bit on and off quickly enough, making a sound of a given frequency. But there is no control over amplitude. I think that webpage is rather disingenuously presenting its audio samples - it's talking about the 1-bit audio, but I think those sounds (at least the Agent X 2 track you're asking about) are played on a Spectrum 128k (or more likely, a modern software emulation thereof) which had a General Instrument AY-3-8910 sound chip - a real sound chip with proper oscillators and multiple channels (info). Compare the version on the page you linked to this youtube clip which appears to be a real original Spectrum playing the same music on "beep speaker". It sounds much worse, much noisier, and there's no fade at the end.

For a pretty detailed discussion of how audio was synthesised on the original Spectrum, I do recommend this video. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 11:16, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 8

What percentage of a ship is under water?

I was wondering how much of a ship is actually under water. Of course we know that weight equals displacement, but what is the relationship between the volumes of the underwater parts to the overall volume of the main hull, and the overall volume of the cubic contents (including superstructure)? For a submerged sub, it's 100% under water - that's easy. But how a about the Japanese battleship Yamato? Or a modern ultra-large crude carrier like the TI-class supertankers? For those we at least get the difference between unloaded and loaded displacement (67,591 tonnes empty - which is still up there with the largest battleships ever built, and 509,484 tonnes fully loaded - which is stupendous). --Stephan Schulz (talk) 11:56, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

The fraction of volume under water is equal to the density of the ship divided by the density of the water. Problem is, how do you define the volume of the above water parts? Volume of the fully enclosed space, volume of the smallest convex surrounding (sorry, forgot the proper maths term), volume of the bounding box? PiusImpavidus (talk) 16:38, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

The mathematical term is "convex hull", but for a ship with a tall mast this is not a reasonable approach. A typical ship design has a relatively small number of relatively small openings, such as hatches and ports, that will be closed under severe storm conditions in order to keep the ship from taking water. This creates a closed surface enclosing the ship; it seems reasonable to me to use the enclosed volume for the total volume, also when the hatches and ports are open. This does not work for an open boat, such as a rowboat, but imagine a custom-made cover of fabric for the boat to keep rainwater out and we have again a closed surface that determines a specific volume.  --Lambiam 20:38, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. The background (though not quite scientific) is that I'm currently looking for physics gaffes in ancient German pulp SF novels. One of the problems is that the authors don't quite get the square-cube law, and thus their giant spaceships with (so they think) giant masses turn out to have the density of a puff pastry. I would like to get some comparison data for real ships. So for volume think e.g. Space Battleship Yamato. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:06, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

I did calculate an airship. 2500 m high and 1:8:64 aspect ratio. With 10 cm average hull thickness it can lift a whole village into an earthquake area. With 15 cm it doesn't even fly. (There were other assumptions that may modify the numbers slightly) 176.0.162.62 (talk) 21:18, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Surely it will depend entirely on the architecture and materials of each individual ship design? I don't see how there could be a simple formula or whatever relating to all ships. For example, the same design could be constructed using any one of many woods of different densities, or of various metals, and the percentage would be different for each variant.

Consider also vessels using hydrofoils. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 17:15, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

That's why I listed two concrete examples. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 20:21, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Titanic = 100%, submarines = 100%, Enterprise = 0%. --217.149.171.88 (talk) 17:18, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

If you exclude your parenthetical (including superstructure) there is a term for this ratio which is reserve buoyancy. That is a redirect and probably a more explanatory article would be freeboard. I've looked for a value for Yamato but just WP's Yamato-class battleship#Armor "...designed with a very large amount of reserve buoyancy..." I don't know what would help for the volume of a superstructure but maybe you could put some limit on it by assuming a cuboidal cow (see block coefficient for different types of ships) and noting that metacentric height must be > 0. fiveby(zero) 00:56, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Archimedes Principle: buoyant force (upwards) = volume displaced. For a watertight hull with gunwales (outer walls) above the waterline, you draw an imaginary line across the waterline: the volume of non-water-continuous-with-the-sea that's under that line, times weight-density of water (i.e. times density times g), equals the buoyant force. (To set this as an equation, for simple shapes and approximations you can use areas of triangles/prisms, while for more complex shapes you probably want to use integral calculus.)

With no other forces (such as lift from hydrofoils or flat-bottom planing), the boat's waterline is determined where buoyant force = its total weight -- that is, its total mass times g. (This is mass that you would measure by weighing on drydock, for example -- it's independent of how you would think about floating on water.) If your ship's total mass is unknown, but you generally know about stuff like the enclosed volume and what kind of materials are involved, then you would consider the wall thicknesses, enclosed space, etc.

Note that the air inside the enclosed space is often ignored in calculations because there is air outside too -- the air outside provides buoyancy as well, but since an enclosed seagoing ship is mostly filled with air, that cancels out. However, for an airship, the buoyancy of air is the critical consideration. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:16, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Oil tankers are almost water density compared to modern cruise ships. 100 cubic feet per (long?) ton is an intermediate density once used for measuring ship volumes. The modern volume ton assumes a similar density that increases 0.02 g/cm³ per order of magnitude. Presumably cause square-cube law makes larger ships weaker per ton of structure. The Empire State Building has a mass of 365,000 tons and volume of 37 million cubic feet for a density coincidentally similar to gross ton and gross register ton but the Twin Towers and Sears Tower used a different structural method and have significantly less density. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:38, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 9

A spacewalk odyssey

When Alexei Leonov couldn't get back into the airlock at the end of his space walk and had to let the air out of his space suit to get back in, for how long was he without air? Also, was this the inspiration for the decompression scene in Space Odyssey 2001? 2601:646:8082:BA0:2424:470:A683:D4AF (talk) 00:13, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

The article says, "He opened a valve to allow some of the suit's pressure to bleed off..." As to whether that influenced the 2001 scene, I couldn't say. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:10, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

The Voskhod 2 spacewalk was in March 1965; Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke drafted the screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1964–5, finishing in December, and filming was in 1966–7, during which both screenplay and novel were further amended. (Note that the screenplay was not based on the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel) by Clarke and Kubrick [sic]; instead the two were written in parallel, with many variant scenes proposed and dropped, and the two works ended up with some differences.)

Leonov's difficulties and the necessity of depressurising his spacesuit were not immediately revealed by the Soviet authorities, and only emerged "later" (though I haven't discovered exactly when), so it's unlikely that Kubrick & Clarke knew about them when writing. Clarke doesn't mention the event in The Lost Worlds of 2001.

Yes, the Soviets were not terribly good at admitting their space programme cock-ups; both the 1960 Nedelin catastrophe and the 1980 Plesetsk launch pad disaster weren't publicly acknowledged until 1989. Alansplodge (talk) 11:54, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

An answer might be found in Michael Benson's 2018 book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, which unfortunately I don't have. Anyone? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 18:52, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! So, the answer to the second question is that Clarke didn't know -- right? So that leaves the first question: for how long was Leonov without air? 2601:646:8082:BA0:98A8:D148:F8F4:4270 (talk) 02:25, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Leonov was never without air because the decompression was partial. And what Clarke did know or not is pure speculation because Clarke was able to look into the future. Clarke did know about satellite tv before it was invented, to use a well known example. 176.0.154.204 (talk) 04:54, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Your second question was, Was Leonov's having to let some air out of his space suit the inspiration for the decompression scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey? If Clarke, who co-wrote the screenplay, didn't know of the Leonov incident, the answer can only be "no". Leonov takes about the incident in an episode of the PBS special "The Russian Right Stuff", which aired in 1991. However, even if Clarke somehow already knew all about this when the screenplay was written, I see no reason to think that it might have been a source of inspiration for which in the film is a completely different scene.  --Lambiam 08:11, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Clarke was a very avid scuba diver—another environment where you have no external atmosphere to rely on, only what you bring with you, and pressure and pressure gradients are a big deal you have to know about. If anything he was likely drawing on that first-hand knowledge and experience. For the vacuum of space just subtract the water and its associated pressure. Slowking Man (talk) 04:05, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 12

Space iceberg?

On average, what's more massive: an iceberg or a comet? 2601:646:8082:BA0:98A8:D148:F8F4:4270 (talk) 02:26, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Google is your friend. "Density of a comet" gives 0.5-1.0 g/cm³[1] or a mean value of 0.52 ± .01 according to this 2022 paper, while "density of an iceberg" spits out 0.92. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:15, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

You answer on density, not on mass. To convert this info, we would also need the volume distributions of icebergs and comets. I don't think we even have good definitions of how small an iceberg can be and still be a berg ;-). The largest iceberg we have reliable data on is Iceberg B-15, with a surface area of 11007km². I could not find the height, but Ross estimated the depth of the ice shelf as a bit under 300m on the edge (where the berg would have broken off), so that would make it a volume of about 3700km³ corresponding, at the density given above, to 3400 million tons. NASA says comets are "from a few miles to a few tens of miles wide". Let's call it 30km for a biggish one, which makes it about 13500km³. That makes it significantly heavier than B-15, mo matter which density of the given range we use. And, of course, Pluto, at 1.3025e16t, would be a comet if it ever came to the inner solar system. So I would think that on average comets are bigger, but it depends on what you define as iceberg and comet. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 07:51, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Unless you're asking about the average mass, in which case (ballpark numbers) 10¹⁴ kg vs 10¹⁰, respectively. Clarityfiend (talk) 07:28, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

• The largest known comet is called C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli–Bernstein) whic has an ice core "approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island... Its mass is estimated to be a staggering 500 trillion tons". NASA article.
• The largest known iceberg was Iceberg B-15, which " measured around 295 km × 37 km (159 nmi × 20 nmi)". You can do the maths. Alansplodge (talk) 16:59, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

"Respectively" needs clarification, as a commentator reversed the order already. I believe from google that you mean to say that the average mass for comets is 10¹⁴kg, while the average for icebergs is 10¹⁰kg.

Of course the internet loves to not give citations for raw numbers, and as both icebergs and comets span an enormous range of sizes they are difficult to get a representative sample for which the "average" is meaningful (and I would guess a more meaningful average would have to be something like RMS instead of an arithmetic mean.)

To get to the sources, I actually think Google's AI-aided results have gotten better. The text is still wrong, but they do provide the principal source for the text, which the other results do not; and for comet size it's space.com which cites ESA's article on comets, which says that the nucleus is "usually several kilometers across" based on observation data (space.com says 10km or less). This will be biased to more massive comets, based on the visibility of passing objects, but no matter, because the only way we get to the 10¹⁴kg number for a comet (density 0.6) is by calculating from the maximum nucleus volume, not the average. As for icebergs, I think I can get the 10¹⁰kg number by taking the antarctic iceberg tracking data (a selection of the very largest icebergs visible by satellite), multiplied by the thickness of antarctic sea ice (1--2 meters) and sea ice density, which gives 6x10¹¹kg, which is ballpark. So I think these numbers looking at something closer to the very largest icebergs vs the very largest comets, instead of the averages.

I have not been able to find ready sources attempting to systematically find average masses. I found one taking a random survey of sea ice of all types, but nothing to compare it to, and it's difficult to convert the measured areas to full masses given the varieties of sea ice involved.

To conclude, an "average" is undetermined until we get a survey that gives some landscape of small-sized comets and icebergs. Every example given so far only measures the largest examples. SamuelRiv (talk) 17:57, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Sea ice is frozen sea water, which can be a few metres thick. Icebergs are pieces that have broken away from glaciers and can be several hundred metres thick. For the largest icebergs, that gives 4000 km² times 300 m times 920 kg/m³ is about 10¹⁵ kg. The range in size is very wide. A small iceberg could have a 20 by 20 by 6 metre pyramid above the surface, giving a mass around $6\cdot 10^{6}$ kg. Looks like a very large iceberg is more massive than a big comet, but most icebergs are less massive than a small comet. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:47, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for catching this. Yeah, the table of iceberg sizes with heights is in the article (and Universal Compendium has similar table that includes mass estimates).

I found in Sulak et al 2017 a distribution and model for Arctic icebergs (sampled from a few Nordic fjords), including volume calculation. This and other studies show that the distribution of iceberg area follows a power law with some head and tail divergence. (They also model apparent breadth, surface area, and total volume of icebergs as a power law with a rather good fit.) Among three fjords studied, they report mean volumes (excluding largest and smallest sizes), with an average between them of about 40x10⁴ m³ (average area about 40x10² m²), which gives an average mass of 3.7x10⁸ kg.

They also gave an average for the "maximum"-sized icebergs they found (not sure on the methodology with that number), which is 1.8x10⁸ m³ among the fjords, giving 1.7x10¹¹ kg.

Arctic ice is considered much thicker than Antarctic ice (which is what my numbers in the previous comment were, that User:PiusImpavidus used). I believe I looked up the Antarctic tabular icebergs as having average thicknesses closer to 30 m rather than 300 m. I'm not sure where their number comes from still: a tracking survey of "the largest icebergs" in the Antarctic is what I had originally used, so I'm guessing they are using the largest iceberg, A23a, at 3672 sq km. I'm not sure if the absolute maximum sizes are illustrative of anything here. You can find a continental-sized iceberg in Earth's history, or you can find a comet the size of Pluto (which of course is another debate). SamuelRiv (talk) 14:42, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

As an interesting aside, your question's wording is vulnerable to a variant of Simpson's paradox: In a hypothetical scenario, let's say every day for a year, you see one comet and one iceberg pass. In this hypothetical, on the vast majority of days, the comet you see that day is much bigger than the iceberg, while on only a couple days you had an enormous iceberg be bigger than the passing comet. Then if you total up the day-by-day as like a win-to-loss record for the year, one can accurately say that "on average, a comet is bigger than an iceberg".

Alternatively, you can total all icebergs for all the days over the entire year and find the average iceberg size, and all the comets and find the average comet size, and then compare the average iceberg to the average comet in that sense (even if that might not be representative of they type of iceberg and comet that pass by each other on the same day). If there are many small icebergs that are smaller than most comets, but then only a handful of totally gargantuan ones that skew the average size to be larger than the average comet, then you can accurately say that "an average iceberg is bigger than an average comet".

My previous response ended with a caution about comparing maximum sizes, that the largest comet is (arguably) the size of Pluto, and discounting unobserved minimum sizes. The paper I linked mitigates this by truncating the size bounds in its analysis. SamuelRiv (talk) 15:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Pollen mites

Pollen mite is a redlink, so if there's an existing article, I'd like to create it as a redirect. Would it be a good redirect to the article about the genus Chaetodactylus? At least some members of the genus are pollen mites — I first encountered the concept a few minutes ago when Special:Random showed me Chaetodactylus krombeini — and the genus article says These mites usually kill young bee larvae and feed on provisioned pollen and nectar, but it's quite possible that some pollen mites are members of other genera. Google finds references to a pollen mite Mellitiphis alvearius, but Special:Search finds zero references to a genus Mellitiphis, so I'm wondering if it's just an alternate name. Nyttend (talk) 20:24, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

What I discovered by searching for pollen+mite:

• Things that eat pollen are called palynivores. The article lacks a section on mites.
• Varroa jacobsoni#Evolution says Cleptophagous mites eat pollen and other nutrients stored by bees, but it's unclear what that has to do with that kind of Varroa mite, and I think the whole section has been directly copied from the source.
• One of these kleptoparasites is Parasitellus. It inhabits bumblebees, but steals their pollen.
• Phytoseiidae#Lifestyles says that "type 4" (did we get tired of naming species?) feed primarily on pollen.
• Hummingbird flowers Lobelia laxiflora have a mite that lives inside them eating nectar and pollen.
• Typhlodromips swirskii is cool because it eats pests until all the pests are gone, then survives on pollen until they come back.
• Generalists like Euseius concordis are similar, and eat some pollen sometimes.

The C. krombeini article strongly implies that "pollen mite" is the common name (if a misnomer) of the genus Chaetodactylus. I guess I should have been searching for evidence of that instead of finding all this other stuff.

OK, now I've found a site that says "the scientific name is Melittiphis alvearlus", and a forum that says "pollen mites are usually Carpoglyphus lactis". This may be a situation where asking three beekeepers will produce three different answers.

From those names, I found the very specific and practical site Bee Mite ID.  Card Zero  (talk) 04:05, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I have not checked all of it, but at least substantial parts of the text of Varroa jacobsoni echo, with minor variations, text found in

Oldroyd, B. P. (1999). "Coevolution while you wait: Varroa jacobsoni, a new parasite of western honeybees". Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 14(8), 312–315. doi:10.1016/s0169-5347(99)01613-4.

V. jacobsoni, as described there, is parasitic, feeding on bee larvae, and not cleptophagous.  --Lambiam 14:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Bee Mite ID mentions only Melittiphis and Chaetodactylus as "pollen mites", so a disambiguation page linking to those two (with a redlink for the first) seems like a good start.  Card Zero  (talk) 18:58, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

aren't redlinks forbidden on disambiguation pages? Won't be a stub article a better idea? 176.0.148.153 (talk) 19:57, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes. I thought vaguely the redlink would cause somebody to make the article, didn't know about this rule.  Card Zero  (talk) 20:31, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

See MOS:DABRED. They're allowed if there's an article that mentions them (and is also redlinked). Clarityfiend (talk) 21:05, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

a redlinked article can mention something? 2A02:3032:302:3F8E:5531:CB3D:1EB2:F4FC (talk) 02:34, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

October 13

Chicken's ancestors vs. ours

I have heard it claimed that at some point in prehistory, the chicken's ancestors ate our ancestors. Is that actually true? Animal lover |666| 17:20, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

My ancestors weren't eaten by prehistoric chickens 🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️🐤 - well at least not until after they'd had eggs/babies :-) NadVolum (talk) 17:38, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

It's likely true. Chickens are Birds, which are surviving therepod dinosaurs, which originated around 230 million years ago and (it is thought) were originally mostly carnivorous or omnivorous. Avialae, the clade including bird ancestors, became distinct from other Theropods perhaps around 160 million years ago. We are primate mammals, whose ancestors the Mammaliformes evolved some time between 200 and 150 million years ago, were mostly small, and were undoubtably predated by many dinosaurs, including some Avialae. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 20:41, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Astonishingly, this question is an existing Google search term: "common ancestor of chickens and humans". The top result, from Nature, a reputable scientific journal, says:

The most recent common ancestor for humans and chickens is thought to have been some kind of primitive reptile that lived more than 310 million years ago. [2]

Alansplodge (talk) 11:49, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

But unless it was cannibalistic, this common ancestor is not an example of an ancestor of the birds eating an ancestor of the primates.  --Lambiam 17:22, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Ah yes, misread the question (again). Alansplodge (talk) 08:54, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I misread ate as are, too. —Tamfang (talk) 21:05, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The split between the clades Sauropsida (which includes chickens) and Synapsida (which includes us) took place about 312 million years ago.^[3] There was ample opportunity for the carnivorous theropods in the ancestral line of today's chickens, which appeared 231 million years ago, to snack on contemporaneous siblings of some of our ancestors.  --Lambiam 17:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It's even conceivable that an actual ancestor of chickens (not just a random member of an ancestral population) ate an actual ancestor of humans. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:12, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

October 14

Does the Minkowski space (or the Min. metric) add, any empirically verifiable information, to Einstein's original Special Relativity theory?

Just as Einstein's Special Relativity theory added some empirically verifiable information, to what scientists had known about physics. HOTmag (talk) 08:01, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

No it doesn't. It is a name for the mathematical structure of the space described in Special Relativity. If you take it away you just make things cumbersome and can't talk properly to physicists. It would be like taking complex numbers away from electronics - it would make formulae bigger and annoy people. NadVolum (talk) 09:06, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

That's what I think as well, but surprisingly, your first sentence is not mentioned (nor hinted) in our article Minkowski space, although it's a very important point that should have been pointed out, IMO. HOTmag (talk) 09:47, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The earliest empirical confirmations of special relativity announced by Einstein in 1905 included Arthur Eddington's photographic record of the Solar eclipse of May 29, 1919. I expect that Eddington was aware of Minkowski's lecture that presented his Spacetime diagram in 1908. Philvoids (talk) 09:17, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

AFAIK, this solar eclipse has nothing to do with special relativity. HOTmag (talk) 09:43, 14 October 2024 (UTC) Thank you for that correction. Philvoids (talk) 15:20, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The very first sentence of Minkowski space says "In physics, Minkowski space (or Minkowski spacetime) is the main mathematical description of spacetime in the absence of gravitation", and later in the lead "Minkowski space is closely associated with Einstein's theories of special relativity and general relativity and is the most common mathematical structure by which special relativity is formalized". It says it is used in formalizing special relativity, it does not say it is a theory or anything like that. That's straight in your face! No extra 'hinting' is needed! NadVolum (talk) 11:10, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

In physics, Minkowski space (or Minkowski spacetime) is the main mathematical description of spacetime in the absence of gravitation. Yes, but I can't see any relation between this fact and my question in the title.

Minkowski space is closely associated with Einstein's theories of special relativity. Of course, just as the electric force - actually expressed by Coulomb's law, is closely associated with the magnetic force - actually expressed by the Lorentz force law. Yet, the Lorentz force law, does add some empirically verifiable information to Coulomb's law. For the same reason, the sentence you've quoted from our article Minkowski space, doesn't rule out the possibility that the Minkowski space adds some empirically verifiable information to Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Minkowski space...is the most common mathematical structure by which special relativity is formalized. Of course. That's because the Minkowski space is an integral part of Special relativity. However, my question in the title didn't ask whether the Minkowski space added new information to "Special relativity", but rather whether the Minkowski space added new information to "Einstein's original Special Relativity theory".

That's why I'm still asking, if you think the article should have pointed out the very important fact (IMO), that the Minkowski space added no new information to "Einstein's original Special Relativity theory. HOTmag (talk) 11:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

No I see no good reason for thinking the article should say irrelevant things like that. Find a reliable source if you want to add it. NadVolum (talk) 13:20, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Isn't your first sentence (in your first response) based on a reliable source? If it is, then what does your last sentence (in your last response) mean? HOTmag (talk) 13:24, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

No what I said is not based on a reliable source. This discussion is not an article. NadVolum (talk) 13:46, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm quite surprised. You are calling - the relation between the Minkowski space and Einstein's theory of Special relativity - "irrelevant things", but you admit that your own opinion (about this relation) - that the Minkowski space adds no empirically verifiable information to Einstein's original Special Relativity theory - "is not based on a reliable source".

Anyway, we will probably remain in disagreement, about whether this relation is "irrelevant" (as you claim) or "very important" (as I claim). I wonder what other users think about this controversy between us. HOTmag (talk) 15:26, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

There are experimentally verifiable geographic facts, such as that Europa and Asia are part of a connected landmass that is not connected to the Americas. There are many ways to create flat two-dimensional maps of the surface Earth, such as the Mercator projection and the Mollweide projection. The maps are alternative ways of describing the same geographic reality; obviously, they cannot produce new verifiable geographic facts. Likewise, Minkowski space is an alternative way of mathematically describing the same physical reality; it cannot produce new verifiable physical facts.  --Lambiam 17:18, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I think as well, as I have already responded to the user above you, but then I asked them a follow-up question, as you can see above. HOTmag (talk) 07:08, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure what the follow-up question is. In my opinion, it would be curious, to say the least, to see some statement in Wikipedia to the effect that the Molweide projection did not add any empirically verifiable information to geography. It is not different for Minkowski space and physics.  --Lambiam 15:26, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Mathematics is a symbolic system used for describing and organizing information. Like natural languages. Minkowski space is a mathematical construction, used for...describing and organizing information. This question is in essence like asking, "Did the German language (the original language Einstein wrote his big scientific papers in such as the one in which he set out special relativity) add any empirically verifiable information to sp. relativity?" It's a category error. I guess the simple answer is, "No, why would it? Does the number 17 add any?" Slowking Man (talk) 04:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, all agree that mathematics is a symbolic system used for describing and organizing information. Of course the Minkowski space is a mathematical construction, intended to describe and organize the information in Einstein's Special relativity. The only question is, if the Minkowski space only does what it's intended to do, or - not on purpose - does more. For example, If I try to describe and organize the finite sequence: (1,2,4,8,16,32), I may use the mathermatcal construction $a_{n+1}=2a_{n}$. But this mathematical construction does more than what it's intended to do, because it also predicts that 32 is followed by 64... I guess that's why your last sentence begins with "I guess". But my original question is about what the facts really are. HOTmag (talk) 05:40, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

If the OP's question ever find a "Yes" reply, its explanation would likely benefit the articles Tests of general relativity and Test theories of special relativity. At present neither article mentions Minkowski. Philvoids (talk) 15:20, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

There is the possibility to switch the sign in Minkowski space. Then the Minkowski space would have properties of Quaternions. That would add additional properties. 176.0.154.107 (talk) 13:27, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Now you can ask why the sign is chosen that way it is. The possible answer is to avoid the consequences. Another answer is that a coin never falls on both sides. You can choose which answer you like most. Even by tossing a coin. 176.0.154.107 (talk) 13:34, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

That would add additional properties. Empirically verifiable ones? HOTmag (talk) 15:52, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Violation of the conservation of energy by virtual particles, vs violation of the formula E=mc^2

Virtual particles, appearing out of the cacuum, are known to be a (theoretical) instance violating the conservation of energy.

Is there also any instance (even a theoretical one only), violating the formula $E_{0}=m_{0}c^{2}$ (while $E_{0}$ denotes a given body's rest energy and $m_{0}$ denotes the body's rest mass)? HOTmag (talk) 12:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Theory says they don't. However they can for instance have negative kinetic energy which balances the equation. NadVolum (talk) 13:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

What do you mean by "they"? Do you mean virtual particles?

Additionally, what do you mean by "don't"? Do you mean they don't [violate the conservation of energy]? Or don't [violate the equation $E_{0}=m_{0}c^{2}]?$

Additionally, could you elaborate on your second sentence? HOTmag (talk) 13:35, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes they refers to a virtual particle, but really since one never comes across an actual isolated virtual particle one should be considering the whole configuration, see On shell and off shell. NadVolum (talk) 13:42, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. HOTmag (talk) 15:28, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think they're violating conservation of energy. Yes, they "exist" and would have mass. At the same time they're entangled to have a zero sum of mass. That means, if you observe one of the particles into existence, the other particle automatically achieves negative mass equivalent to the observed particle. Such a "negative" particle is for all intents and purposes like an anti particle,but with one exception. If it encounters it's partner (entangled or not) it doesn't annihilate, it merely nihilates. That is like annihilation but without releasing energy. 2A02:3032:302:3F8E:5531:CB3D:1EB2:F4FC (talk) 02:30, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

October 15

Audio Engineer vs. Music Engineer

Are these two things interchangeable? Or is there a meaningful difference? Trade (talk) 01:44, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Audio is reciting too. 2A02:3032:302:3F8E:5531:CB3D:1EB2:F4FC (talk) 02:09, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Neither are engineers, but we let them bask in reflected glory. Greglocock (talk) 04:18, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Seriously tho both audio engineer and music engineer are sharing the same Wikidata item and i need to figure out if i should split them Trade (talk) 05:13, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Is a music engineer the same as a music producer? Some random website about careers thinks audio and music engineers are different, although it implausibly claims that the primary skill for an audio engineer is video, and I don't know why music engineers need to know R.  Card Zero  (talk) 05:27, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Engineering in the recording industry can be very well defined. There are engineers who focus solely on drum kits and nothing else. There are engineers who focus solely on microphone gear and placement and nothing else. If you ask them for their title, they might say they are a sound engineer or recording engineer or audio engineer or music engineer. The title isn't important. The skill being implemented during the production of a recording is what is important. My short experience (installing Sony hardware in one studio) involved working with engineers in front of and behind the glass. The ones in front of the glass set up mics, cables, etc... The ones behind the glass worked on the audio levels, mixes, and such. They worked together, but did not do each other's jobs. Then, when finished, more engineers came in and worked on optimizing the mix for CD compression (this was pre-MP3 days). So, in summary, the title means whatever they want it to mean because the title is not directly related to the job performed. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 13:09, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The behind glass people can also be called "sound desk operators", if you want a less vain designation. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:12, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I’ve been practising audio engineering at my college. When I’m in the studio, I would call myself a recording engineer or mixing engineer. Pablothepenguin (talk) 16:56, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Electron energy level in atoms

Depending on the excited state of the atoms, some electrons are in a higher energy state than in their ground state. But what is the distance from the nucleus of an electron when its energy level increases, does it move away or does it move closer? Does its angular velocity increase or decrease? Malypaet (talk) 11:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The usual type of excitation is that that electron moves into a different atomic orbital. The mathematical definition of an electron's state does include among other things both angular-momentum details and something similar to the average distance from the nucleus. The exact types of change depend on which orbitals are involved. But remember that electrons are not objects that "orbit", so the idea of simple closer vs further or faster vs slower, as one might visualize planetary motion, is an incorrect model that leads to many incorrect thoughts. DMacks (talk) 11:52, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

As in the naive Bohr model, the expected distance of an electron to the nucleus of an atom, given its orbital, is determined by the principal quantum number n of that orbital. Here, "expected distance" means the mean distance obtained by experimental measurements, which make the orbital wave function collapse. There is a relationship between the energy and this expected distance, although the precise picture is complicated; see Electron shell § Subshell energies and filling order.  --Lambiam 06:02, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

For the naive person that I am, I understand that the electron is a particle with a mass and moves in a particular probabilistic way around an atomic nucleus having a kinetic energy (${\frac {1}{2}}mv^{2}?$). So, if the most energetic electrons are the furthest away, what is the force that keeps them with the nucleus, an increase in their electric charge in relation to their energy level, , or whatever else? (I understand that with a soup of electrons rotating around a nucleus we are in a world of probability.) Malypaet (talk) 13:18, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

It is a vibrating cloud of excitations to which you cannot assign a velocity. Perhaps the answers given here will help you.  --Lambiam 15:38, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks Malypaet (talk) 21:41, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Another way to think about the energy of an electron in an orbital is by considering its ionization energy - the energy it would take to remove it. For hydrogen atoms, the energy needed to remove a ground state electron is 13.6 MeV eV, so we say the n=1 energy level has energy -13.6 MeV eV.

An electron in a higher level requires less work to knock it off. For n=2, the required energy is only 3.4 MeV eV, meaning an electron at the n=2 level is 10.2 MeV eV MORE energetic than n=1, at -3.4 MeV eV. PianoDan (talk) 22:46, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

This is similar to a gravitational orbital system, in which a body in a more distant orbit needs less energy to extract itself from the system. Malypaet (talk) 09:28, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Quite so. And both the electromagnetic and gravitational forces are inverse square forces.

Although it is somewhat unsettling to consider a situation where the planets are actually smears of probability in circular harmonics rather than, you know, planets. PianoDan (talk) 15:49, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

A gas giant is just a smear in many ways. DMacks (talk) 16:07, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I suspect that electrons all have the same mass and repel each other. In addition, this energy level system must involve another physical phenomenon than that of electric charge. Malypaet (talk) 18:16, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

All electrons DO have the same mass and repel each other. You don't need to "suspect" that, it's settled science.

And I was being silly when I compared planets to electrons. While electromagnetism and gravity are both inverse square laws, the energy level system is due to the Pauli exclusion principle, which absolutely does not apply on astronomical scales. PianoDan (talk) 20:48, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Did you confuse electrons with neutrons? MeV are nuclear, electrons are in the range eV to keV. 176.0.163.195 (talk) 13:58, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

No, I just flat used the wrong units. I type "MeV" all day at work. :) PianoDan (talk) 15:45, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

October 16

Total global river discharge rate

Is there an estimate for the total global discharge rate of surface / ground water to the sea? It would be nice to state e.g. the Amazon as a percentage of the global total, just as we do for areas and populations of large countries. — kwami (talk) 06:23, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I googled "amazon river total discharge rate" and it led me back to Amazon River, which says "The Amazon River has an average discharge of about 215,000–230,000 m3/s (7,600,000–8,100,000 cu ft/s)—approximately 6,591–7,570 km3 (1,581–1,816 cu mi) per year, greater than the next seven largest independent rivers combined." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, rather amazing. We used to have a circle graph in that article that gave percentages, but the numbers were bullshit so I removed it. It would be nice to have an accurate graph, though: the full circle would be the global total, with pie slices for individual rivers. — kwami (talk) 07:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@kwami By a global discharge do you mean including rivers ending in endorheic basins, like a Caspian Sea? Not that it would make any noticeable difference... --nitpicking CiaPan (talk) 15:28, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The Caspian is an ocean, so certainly. As you say, I doubt the others would even be visible on a global scale. I'm not going to quibble with whatever I can find. — kwami (talk) 20:28, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The place to search I would think would be in studies of the water cycle, and to look at the estimates that cut off that segment. Maybe check out some of the sources in that article to start (and their background sections to find sources for wider overviews, that might put down some hard estimates). SamuelRiv (talk) 15:50, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I haven't had much luck, but I've written a couple of those sources to ask if they know of any estimates. — kwami (talk) 23:59, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

"The estimated total from all rivers, large and small, measured and unmeasured, is about 9200 mi³ (38,300 km³) yearly (25 mi³ or 105 km³ daily)."^[4]  --Lambiam 13:38, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Rivers with an average discharge of 5,000 m³/s or greater, as a fraction of the estimated global total.

Thanks! That comes out to 1.2 million m3/second, so per our figures the Amazon is ~ 18% of the global total. — kwami (talk) 03:24, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Less than one Sears Tower volume per second, though there are probably times when ice dams break and snow gets rained on and some rivers flood and it is more. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Daylight saving time - why change on different dates?

In the UK & Europe, daylight saving time this year runs from 31 Mar – 27 Oct.

In the USA & Canada, it's 10 Mar – 3 Nov.

In Australia, the opposite changes are 7 Apl – 6 Oct.

Why not make them coincide? Surely there would be cost savings on all sides? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:12, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Why have DST at all? :D

Speaking a bit more seriously: isn't the debate more about abolishing DST than making it consistent across countries? According to this Bloomberg article from 2021, there are moves to do so in the US and the EU. Double sharp (talk) 15:20, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

There is also discussion in America of making DST permanent. But nothing ever gets done. America and Europe's dates used to be pretty close to coinciding, but America expanded it some years back. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:17, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

In Australia it's determined on a state-by-state basis. It's settled down now to a consistent set of dates, but Queensland and Western Australia both adopted and abandoned it more than once. For some decades now neither state has had DST, which makes it fun and games when working out times in the eastern states, and when travelling east-west or reverse, during the summer period. This is all because our Constitution makes no mention of time as a Commonwealth responsibility, which means it's automatically a state matter. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:07, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Also state-by-state in America: Daylight saving time in the United States. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:15, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, sort of. As I understand it, states have the option to observe DST or not, but they do not have the option to choose their own starting/ending dates. I'm not really convinced that this restriction is constitutional (I have a fairly narrow view of the Commerce Clause) but there doesn't seem to be any great advantage for a state to challenge it. --Trovatore (talk) 00:21, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, that's what I was trying to say. And presumably interstate commerce is the justification for the federal law. If I remember correctly, the need for standard time was driven by the railroads, in place of a myriad of local times. And also, if I recall correctly, it used to be that the railroads worked strictly within standard time, even during DST, as DST was only sporadically used until 1967. Once DST became standardized, the railroads could change to DST also. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:15, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

While we have an article on Summer time in Europe, it is not very detailed. I found what appears at glance to be a reliable and well-researched article on the history of European time zones at "When Did DST Start in Europe?" via timeanddate, which suggests that Central European Summer Time Standard Time as we know it (with its onset date) really began its continuity and spread from the Nazi conquests. (Other countries had been experimenting with daylight saving, but inconsistently, as the article explains.) The incongruity in clock-switch dates would be due to the haphazard nature of daylight saving being adopted in various countries, where countries tend to only finally decide to align their clocks with some treaty or conquest or absolute trade necessity. (Of course there are famous exceptions: the U.S. state of Indiana only adopted daylight saving in 2005, despite [EDIT: most of] the rest of the continental U.S., including the entire surrounding time zone, having uniform daylight saving dates.) SamuelRiv (talk) 01:56, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Be careful — CEST does not stand for "Central European Standard Time" (easy mistake to make as a North American) but for "Central European Summer Time". It's the opposite of what you would expect from PST / PDT. CET is UTC+1; CEST is UTC+2. --Trovatore (talk) 06:08, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

As for Indiana, I assume that's because they're so far west in their time zone, making DST a double misery for night owls and farmers. They really should be on Central Time and then it would be much less of a problem. --Trovatore (talk) 06:18, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Indeed. They did it to get the same time and business hours as the East (I've heard New York Stock Exchange is important somehow) and cause the enlatenization lobbies like businesses headquartered in EDT and golf are collectively stronger than the delayzation lobbies like CDT headquarters and nightclubs. Great for us New Yorkers, terrible for the Indianan colonists of the aggrandized UTC-4 Time Empire. So no, permanently stopping leap seconds won't cause 9 to 5 jobs to get later till the night owl torture is really bad like Urumqi. There's probably still 9 to 5 jobs in Urumqi, I wonder if they pay better than similar 12 to 8 jobs. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, and not quite true about "the rest of the Continental US" -- Arizona, except for the Navajo Nation, does not observe DST. I expect that's because they're far enough south that the difference between summer and winter times doesn't justify it. Not sure why other southern states don't do the same thing. --Trovatore (talk) 06:21, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

It gets even more confusing. Within the Navajo Nation is the separate Hopi Reservation. Which does not observe DST. So, you go from Arizona in general (no DST), enter the Navajo Nation (has DST), and continue onward into the Hopi Reservation (no DST).--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:08, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes my mistakes, the article I linked specifies CEST = "Summer Time", not "Standard", so that's on me. Also I knew there were other U.S. states that didn't do daylight saving, but I had only remembered Hawaii, and Indiana has always felt like an odd one out for its area in so many ways (usually good ways, Hoosiers). SamuelRiv (talk) 15:57, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Even Cuba has DST for some reason. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:52, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

My nerdy brain tells me that, logically, daylight saving should run for the same amount of time either side of the summer solstice. It doesn't in my state of Australia. My ageing memory tells me that the finishing date was extended further into autumn by a populist state premier who wanted more people to go to the Formula 1 Grand Prix. HiLo48 (talk) 02:16, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Your logic may fail to take into account that the Equation of time is not symmetrical, owing to that pesky 0.0167 eccentricity of the Earth's orbit: see the end of the Practical use section. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:47, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

What difference would it make? HiLo48 (talk) 03:53, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Mid-sunlight isn't 12:00 at 150° East, it's 12:14 in February and 11:44 in early November and 12:00ish in April and December and early September and a few minutes early or late in May and July.

Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

My nerdy brain tells me that you can't save daylight hours; what you gain at one end of the day, is lost at the other. The intended result of shifting working hours relative to daylight hours can also be reached by shifting working hours, and there's nobody stopping us from doing that. I remember a ferry with the notice "Operating hours: 6:00–20:00 winter time, 7:00–21:00 summer time". Although it would be convenient to put zero o'clock, when the date changes, at a time when most people are asleep. Right, it's one o'clock now here, time to go to bed. PiusImpavidus (talk) 23:06, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Here in Australia, one argument against daylight saving is the issue of milking cows. It's hard to tell cows with bursting udders to just hold on a bit longer. HiLo48 (talk) 23:14, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

British cows concur. DuncanHill (talk) 23:25, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

We now have milking robots; they don't care when the cows want to be milked (molken?), although the cows may have to wait for their turn. You can't run a big dairy farm without robotic help. PiusImpavidus (talk) 16:14, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Aarrgh, AI has struck! We're all doomed! -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:07, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

What have the Nazis done for us? In the UK - Double daylight saving. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 08:53, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The first national daylight saving was courtesy of Kaiser Bill and his minions. Alansplodge (talk) 09:27, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The more I hear about that man the less I like him. DuncanHill (talk) 21:54, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The above is all interesting, but almost none of it addresses the question: "Why not make them coincide? Surely there would be cost savings on all sides?". Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 15:08, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

You really expect America to do something that makes it easier to interact with the rest of the world? You know, like we've (the US) so readily done with the metric system? Or date format?--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:29, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I expect them to do so when it is in their interest, yes. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 18:19, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Once again I point to the metric system.--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 20:45, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Europe got tired of copying our extensions. Also Europe time's fucked up maybe they can't take more, 9 degrees West has the time of 30 degrees East in summer just cause they copied Hitler & seem to want all EU same time, (30+9)'s even worse than extreme west Indiana, or the "7.5 degrees plus or minus nearest country border" that it could be. Nov 7 Northwest Iberian sunrise would be late as hell at that latitude. Europe doesn't have many October 31st kids door-to-door afterschool either, Eurolatists can't say "won't someone think of the children!". Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

To make the dates the same would require a treaty - and if so, it would be best for the clock to roll over at the same UTC time everywhere, not just the same date. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:06, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

October 18

Gruesome question about injury

In this (warning: gruesome image) photo of Sinwar's body, is it a shrapnel stuck in his bow? What caused the hole to its right? Zarnivop (talk) 13:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Where are you seeing a bow? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:34, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 19

Falling into Jupiter

I was thinking one day. Imagine you are an astronaut in free fall to Jupiter. You are in a spacesuit with plenty of oxygen and food available so you are not dying from suffocation or starvation in your spacesuit. You have no way of escaping Jupiter's gravity. There are no other dangers than Jupiter itself. You will eventually enter Jupiter's atmosphere. At which point would you die? JIP | Talk 09:30, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

You would be moving so fast, that you would burn up in the upper atmosphere, turning into plasma temporarily. But when the space suit ruptured, by burning through, suffocation and depressurisation would be a terminal issue. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 10:53, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

The thing about vague hypotheticals is, they're vague, and hypothetical. The astronaut could bring along a bigass rocket, and once in a stable orbit around Jupiter fire it to cancel out their orbital momentum until they were at rest relative to Jupiter, then "let go" and just let gravity do its thing pulling them towards Jove's center of mass.

Most spacecraft don't do this b/c hauling reaction mass up a gravity well is a giant pain. The "easiest" way to slow down for landing, is to slam into the atmosphere and let that bleed off your velocity. If you can. If not, for ex the atmosphere is very thin, other methods are required: see the Mars probes, or lunar landings.

(The real non-hypothetical answer: they would be long-dead of acute radiation syndrome before anything else, unless their "spacesuit" was a massive, very dense and multilayered radiation shield chamber) Slowking Man (talk) 04:30, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

The onset of radiation syndrome is slow enough that the fall is over before the radiation really kills. Or the radiation is very high, then that should be said where and why. 176.0.161.3 (talk) 12:45, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Since neutrinos (and dark matter) don't interact with light, so what should happen when light comes across them?

I can think about two options:

Option #1: The light keeps travelling "through" them, as if they don't exist. But if this is the case, then what does that mean, in terms of the neutrino's (and dark matter's) refractive index? Is it identical to the vacuum's refractive index?

Option #2: The light experiences absorption or reflection or scattering, in which case the neutrino's (and dark matter's) momentum must be influenced by that encounter with light, due to the conservation of momentum, so we do see them interact with light, in some sense...

So, what's the correct option? Is it #1 or #2 or another one?

HOTmag (talk) 16:29, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Since neutrinos do not interact with light, the light never collides with them. Ruslik_Zero 20:42, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

By "collides" I meant "comes across" (due to your important comment I've just fixed that in the header) So, what should happen if a [a beam of] photon[s] and a [beam of] neutrino[s] travel towards each other, i.e. on the same route but in opposite directions? Similarly, what should happen when light comes across dark matter? HOTmag (talk) 21:04, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

protons and electrons interact with photons. What is their refractive index? Short answer: no one can tell, because the refractive index is not of a particle alone. It depends on the interaction. And neutrinos not only do not interact with photons, they don't interact with each other. So you have no interactions to base a refractive index on. 176.0.161.3 (talk) 22:25, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

The refractive index of a given medium is only relevant if [a beam of] photons can travel through that medium. In the case of protons-electrons you're talking about, nobody claims [a beam of] photons can travel through a proton or through an electron, so I can't see how any refractive index may be relevant in that case. But a refractive index may be relevant in option #1 I was talking about as you can see above in that option. HOTmag (talk) 02:16, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Your fundamental problem is you keep trying to think about "quantum stuff" intuitively, in terms of the familiar everyday big world we all have direct experience of via our senses. You're asking what photons etc "really act like". Billiard balls? Pebbles? Ocean waves etc etc? The correct answer is, they act like none of those things. They act like photons. They don't "take up space" in any way we can visualize, or occupy a definite fixed position in space, or "move" by plodding around from point A to B in a fixed interval of time, or "pass through one another", anything like that.

A necessary precondition to really "grokking" "modern physics", is to throw out your preconceptions, and simply start with: what do our observations of things tell us. From those, we make predictions (hypotheses), and then we test them to see if they're right. That's how science is done. And if you think it's all made up, you're presumably reading this on some kind of electronic device, which simply wouldn't work if electrons were really tiny little balls, or photons were really little tiny beams or rays or water waves that "bounced off" other stuff when they "ran into it".

Richard Feynman: Things on a very small scale behave like nothing that you have any direct experience about. They do not behave like waves, they do not behave like particles, they do not behave like clouds, or billiard balls, or weights on springs, or like anything that you have ever seen. Slowking Man (talk) 05:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

What do you mean by keep trying? When did I try to do that for the first time?

When I posted my question in the header, I had already been quite aware of the methodological idea you're describing quite well. Of course what you're depicting is the correct approach, methodologically speaking. But while you're portraying the correct methodological attitude one should take when thinking about modern physics, my question has nothing to do with methodology, because my question is only a practical one, empirically speaking (as follows), so the correct methodological approach you're quite well picturing has nothing to do with what I've practically asked about. To put it in a clear cut way: Just as you can practically ask, what is empirically expected to happen when one actualizes the photoelectric effect - although it heavily involves quantum physics that should be grokked by means of the methodological idea you're describing, so I can practically ask, what is empirically expected to happen when a [beam of] photon[s] and a [beam of] neutrino[s] travel towards each other, i.e. on the same route but in opposite directions, although both the photon and the neutrino are described in that quantum physics.

So, are you claiming that I can't suggest any experiment in which a [beam of] photon[s] and a [beam of] neutrino[s] travel towards each other, i.e. on the same route but in opposite directions? Similarly are you claiming, that once Science detects (somehow) any dark matter, still we won't be able to suggest any experiment in which we send light towards dark matter? Or what are you actually claiming, practically speaking? HOTmag (talk) 07:53, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

you can never design an experiment where a photon travels on a path. Whatever the path maybe. 😁 For example you can do a photon in a fiber travel from a source to a detector. You will never know that the photon really after the first atom leaves the fiber, travels to the black hole in the centre of the Andromeda galaxy, does half a round around the black hole, a quantum leap short of the event horizon, comes back at the last atom of the fiber and hitting the detector bearing the spectral attenuation of a sodium atom in the middle of the fiber it never passed on the way. Okay that is an extreme example for a very improbable but possible event in quantum mechanics. Now to your question. What if "never interacts with" is a code for active avoidance? That would mean a neutrino near another particle (photon, neutrinos...Whatever) goes out of the way and resumed its travel after the particle has passed. What would you do then? Even going out of time is possible. Think about the length of the way to Andromeda! 176.0.154.107 (talk) 13:13, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

According to your attitude, the very concept of "refractive index" of a given medium through which light travels, would have had no meaning. Additionally, please notice that my original post (i.e. the question in the header and under it), mentions no photons, but rather mentions light only, for example a beam of photons. Anyway, thanks to your comment, I've just added "a beam of" before every "photon" mentioned in my later responses (following my original post). To sum up: the main question in my original post still remains. HOTmag (talk) 13:36, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Rewriting "photon" as "a beam of photons" changes the question. The exact path that a photon will follow cannot be predicted. Subsequent detection of a single photon is possible but allows only an estimate of the spread of likely refractive indices the photon has traversed. One increases the accuracy of a determination of refractive index by averaging measurements of many photons i.e. using "a beam of photons". However there will be practical limits to the focusing of both light sources and detectors. Philvoids (talk) 14:30, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Rewriting "photon" as "a beam of photons" changes the question. Please re-read the second sentence (the one beginning with "Additionally") in my last response.

As for the rest of your response, I agree, but what's the answer to my original question summed up in the header? HOTmag (talk) 15:44, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

So, are you claiming that I can't suggest any experiment in which a [beam of] photon[s] and a [beam of] neutrino[s] travel towards each other, i.e. on the same route but in opposite directions? Similarly are you claiming, that once Science detects (somehow) any dark matter, still we won't be able to suggest any experiment in which we send light towards dark matter?

Essentially, yes, assuming we're right about dark matter not interacting with the electromagnetic field. Or, perhaps it could be put as: we can propose sending photons "this way" and neutrinos "that way", such that their worldlines at some point intersect, but we would expect to observe nothing (other than the extremely minute effects of their gravitational and weak interactions), because why would we?

In this vein: the neutrino fields don't interact with the EM field. The question "what if a beam of X and Y" travel towards each other" is still formulated in intuitive "classical" terms. Talking in strict QM terms, questions like "a beam of X and beam of Y" are ill-formed questions: to be meaningful (answerable) questions, rephrase them in terms of quantum operators, Dirac matrices, Hamiltonian mechanics etc.

Michio Kaku has some good advice for people "talking science": [5]:

Extended content

What to Do If You Have a Proposal for the Unified Field Theory?…and what not to do Due to volume of e-mail I have received (several thousand at last count) I cannot answer all requests, especially those from individuals who have a new proposal for completing Einstein’s dream of a unified field theory, or a new theory of space and time. However, I would like to give some guidelines for people who have thoughtfully pondered the question of the meaning of space-time. 1) Try to summarize the main idea or theme in a single paragraph. As Einstein once said, unless a theory has a simple underlying picture that the layman can understand, the theory is probably worthless. I will try to answer those proposals which are short and succinct, but I simply do not have time for proposals where the main idea is spread over many pages. 2) If you have a serious proposal for a new physical theory, submit it to a physics journal, just as [sic] Physical Review D or Nuclear Physics B. There, it will get the referee and serious attention that it deserves. 3) Remember that your theory will receive more credibility if your theory builds on top of previous theories, rather than making claims like “Einstein was wrong! ” For example, our current understanding of the quantum theory and relativity, although incomplete, still gives us a framework for which we have not seen any experimental deviation.Even Newtonian gravity works quite well within its domain (e.g. small velocities). Relativity is useful in its domain of velocities near the speed of light. However, even relativity breaks down for atomic distances, or gravitational fields found in the center of a black hole or the Big Bang. Similarly, the quantum theory works quite well at atomic distances, but has problems with gravity. A crude combination of the quantum theory and relativity works quite well from sub-atomic distances (10^-15 cm.) to cosmological distances (10^10 km), so your theory must improve on this! 4) Try not to use vague expressions that cannot be formulated precisely or mathematically, such as “time is quantized, ” “energy is space, ” or “space is twisted, ” or “energy is a new dimension,” etc. Instead, try to use mathematics to express your ideas. Otherwise, it’s hard to understand what you are saying in a precise manner. Many referees will throw out papers which are just a collection of words, equating one mysterious concept (e.g. time) with another (e.g. light). The language of nature is mathematics (e.g. tensor calculus and Lie group theory). Try to formulate your ideas in mathematical form so that the referee has an idea of where you are coming from. 5) Once formulated mathematically, it’s then relatively easy for a theoretical physicist to determine the precise nature of the theory. At the very least, your theory must contain the tensor equations of Einstein and the quantum theory of the Standard Model. If they lack these two ingredients, then your theory probably cannot describe nature as we know it. The fundamental problem facing physicists is that General Relativity and the quantum theory, when combined into a single theory, is not “renormalizable, ” i.e. the theory blows up and becomes meaningless. Your proposal, therefore, has to give us a finite theory which combines these two formalisms. So far, only superstring theory can solve this key problem. Important: this means that, at the very minimum, your equations must contain the tensor equations of General Relativity and the Standard Model. If they do not include them, then your theory cannot qualify as a “theory of everything.” 6) Most important, try to formulate an experiment that can test your idea. All science is based on reproducible results. No matter how outlandish your idea is, it must be accepted if it holds up experimentally. So try to think up an experiment which will distinguish your result from others. But remember, your theory has to explain the experiments that have already been done, which vindicate General Relativity and the quantum theory. Good luck!

--Slowking Man (talk) 16:28, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

In my view, presenting Michio Kaku's advice in this thread is redundant, as follows.

Introduction: the reason for which I mentioned the photoelectric effect in my last response to you, is because this effect can be formulated, not only in the language of Quantum chemistry, but also in the language of Classical electromagnetism - which indeed disagrees with this effect but can still tell us what it disagrees with.

The same is true for my original question in the header: It can also be formulated in the language of classical mechanics, as you have done yourself, stating in a classical language (a bit relativistic yet not the language of quantum mechanics): we can propose sending photons this way and neutrinos that way, such that their worldlines at some point intersect, but we would expect to observe nothing. To sum up, you agree to option #1 (in my original post), i.e.: We will see the beam of light keep travelling in the same 4D-route without any change, as if this route is not intersected by the 4D-route of the beam of neutrinos. Am I right? HOTmag (talk) 17:35, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

"Doing" special relativity, which ignores gravitation (assumes flat spacetime) and plotting it out on a Minkowski diagram, correct, b/c they only interact via the weak interaction and it's called that b/c seriously it's really weak. (Not as weak as gravity though!) Which is why gazillions of solar neutrinos are flooding through us and the entire Earth after plowing through half the Sun, like we're all not even there, constantly. (The neat fact being that what changes is simply the direction they come from: at night they're coming upwards from the ground having just zipped through the entire planet, after calling on Earth's day side!)

In gen rel, it would still be the same, b/c the only thing changing is adding in gravitation. The neutrino's mass is immensely tiny, thus its stress-energy-momentum tensor has accordingly miniscule effect on local spacetime geometry (which is what we call "gravity", in GR). Photon's mass is, well, zero, so it has even less effect. And gravitation is really weak.

...Unless, you can crank things up to truly mind-and-spacetime-warping energies, and channel and confine absolutely mind-boggling amounts of photons into a vanishingly-tiny volume of space. Somehow. Photons are bosons, which, unlike fermions such as quarks (or neutrinos), are "allowed" to have all identical quantum numbers if they feel like it. Meaning their wavefunctions can completely overlap and they can all "take up" an arbitrarily small volume. So if you figure how to do that out do tell the scientific journals, preferably before building your death ray and taking over the world.

Nota bene: when physicists these days are "talking shop" generally they only ever use "mass" to mean "the invariant or 'rest mass' according to GR": [6]. So I will try to do the same. --Slowking Man (talk) 19:38, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Unless, you can crank things up to truly mind-and-spacetime-warping energies, and channel and confine absolutely mind-boggling amounts of photons into a vanishingly-tiny volume of space. Btw, some weeks ago I read a scientific article (I think in Nature or in Science) that discovered that a Kugelblitz was actually impossible, because it would've started to emit radiation before it became a black hole, so it would never become a black hole...

when physicists these days are "talking shop" generally they only ever use "mass" to mean "the invariant or 'rest mass' according to GR. I think you've noticed (as follows) that this fact is irrelevant, because the geometry of spcetrime is shaped by energy (and momentum) rather than by mass.

The neutrino's mass is immensely tiny...Photon's mass is, well, zero, so it has even less effect. Correct, less effect but not zero effect, because the geometry of spcetrime is shaped by energy/momentum rather than by mass. Anyway, thank you for noticing the (immensely tiny) generally-relativistic effect being done to the geometry of spacetime by each beam, thus influencing the other beam, so actually they do have some impact on each other after all, yet not via any force other than the fictitious force of gravitation. Well, your noticing this generally-relativistic effect was an important reservation. Anyway, what I'm taking from your answer to my original question is as follows: Both beams don't interact with each other, as far as gravity is ignored. HOTmag (talk) 22:35, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Interactions are predicted. See [7]. Modocc (talk) 22:44, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for this source. HOTmag (talk) 23:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 20

Soap bubbles and flatulence

Let's say that someone ate a whole can of beans for lunch and had a piece of steak, and some milk to wash it all down. A couple of hours later, they're suffering from farting problems, as they have to fart a lot, and the gas doesn't smell good at all. They have filled a bathtub full of water and added a generous amount of soap, and in they go the bathtub. They fart in the there and those bubbles of soap caused by the release of gas travel up onto the surface. If they had a lighter nearby (for whatever reason) and tried to ignite those bubbles, would the bubbles catch on fire? Kurnahusa (talk) 05:16, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't think the human digestive system works as fast as that, but leaving that aside, it's well known that human flatulance is inflammable – lighting one's farts is a widespread activity; I recall a story that one squad of British Army recruits managed to burn down their barracks hut while indulging in it; I would have liked to have been in the Colonel's office the following morning. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 05:40, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I guess? Why wouldn't they? Is there a reason you were expecting them not to? Fun bio facts time the flammable stuff in human flatus is mostly hydrogen gas, made by your little belly buddies fermenting complex carbohydrates that your digestive system can't tackle. And they actually share some of the products with your cells and they're probably good for gut health. (Non-human primates consume buttloads of fiber, as did all humans pre-agriculture.)

The rest of it is mostly swallowed air which makes its way down there, along with small amounts of volatile sulfur compounds also produced by your flora, thiols, which your smeller is extremely sensitive to. That's the smelly stuff. Slowking Man (talk) 19:52, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Haha, no reason why I wouldn't think the bubbles were not flammable; after all, the gases are basically trapped inside, but very interesting as well as informative - thank you! A while back I sprayed some gas from a nearly empty alcohol rub bottle into water and ignited it, and so I thought, if it was possible, the same stuff applies to farts. Kurnahusa (talk) 23:16, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

A bubble of flammable gas in water is an interesting apparatus where you can see inside the bubble before and during it popping. With an electronic igniter, could be fun to try to ignite the bubble itself to demonstate the effect of UEL. Are H2 and methane actually "flammable" when pure? DMacks (talk) 02:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Must every moving [accelerating] body lose energy, namely the energy of the gravitational waves emitted by that body while moving [accelerating]?

HOTmag (talk) 10:08, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Can you accept as a counter example the body envisaged in Newton's first law of motion that remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force? Philvoids (talk) 13:36, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Given a body moving at a constant speed, there is a reference frame in which the body is at rest, from which it follows that it does not emit gravitational waves. Only a change in the gravitational interaction between massive bodies can stir up the gravitational field.  --Lambiam 15:31, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

OP's apology: Sorry for replacing the correct word "accelerating" by the wrong word "moving". I've just fixed that in the header [by brackets]. HOTmag (talk) 16:00, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Responders can lose interest in freely helping a questioner who keeps changing their question. Can you accept that energy must always be added (or subtracted) to accelerate (or decelerate) a body? Reference: Kinetic energy. Philvoids (talk) 19:45, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Responders can lose interest in freely helping a questioner who keeps changing their question. What do you mean by keeps changing my question? When did I change my question, excluding this single time (for which I have already apologized)?

Can you accept that energy must always be added (or subtracted) to accelerate (or decelerate) a body? Yes, I can, and I do accept. Still, I'm asking if, besides the energy your're talking about, one should also take into account another amount of energy that should actually be subtracted because of the gravitational waves which are always emitted by every accelerating body. HOTmag (talk) 22:59, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

The term Gravitational wave rather than gravity wave is used in article space.

Energy (luminosity) carried away by gravitational waves is purportedly given by Einstein's Quadrupole formula

${\frac {dE}{dt}}=\sum _{ij}{\frac {G}{5c^{5}}}\left({\frac {d^{3}I_{ij}^{T}}{dt^{3}}}\right)^{2}$

As yet this has been only partially confirmed by an observation of a binary star combination of a neutron star and a pulsar (earning the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics). Research continues and I think we are far from the kind of laboratory demonstration that is needed to cement this theory to the same extent as, for example, the refined measurements of Gravitational constant G initiated (effectively but not deliberately) by Cavendish. Philvoids (talk) 02:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The term Gravitational wave rather than gravity wave is used in article space. Of course. Has anyone ever used the term "gravity wave", in this thread?

Energy (luminosity) carried away by gravitational waves is purportedly given by Einstein's Quadrupole formula. Now let's assume that Einstein was correct. So, regardless of the other kind of energy mentioned in your previous response, must every accelerating body lose the kind of energy you're mentioning in your last response, namely the energy of the gravitational waves emitted by that body while accelerating? HOTmag (talk) 09:42, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

According to the theory, a spherically symmetric pulsing body wouldn't emit gravitational waves. NadVolum (talk) 10:46, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Does it mean that spherically asymmetric pulsing bodies would? HOTmag (talk) 14:37, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The opposite of "spherically symmetric" is "not spherically symmetric". The pulsation of body needs to respect certain symmetries in order to keep its centre of mass at rest. As the formula says, the quadrupole of the mass distribution needs to change. Think of a wobbling drop of water. A rotating barbell emits gravitational waves, as does (in a similar way) a pair of orbiting black holes. All the detected gravitational wave events are of that type, occasionally with a neutron star in place of a black hole. --Wrongfilter (talk) 16:12, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I am content that the single counter-example provided by NadVolume answers the OP's question. Philvoids (talk) 16:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, if you're content, I guess I'll just keep my mouth shut in the future. --Wrongfilter (talk) 16:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for these examples. So, regardless of the kinetic energy added to an accelerating body, do the bodies in your examples also lose radiant energy - due to the emission of gravitational waves? HOTmag (talk) 19:30, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The single counter-example provided by NadVolume, only answers the question in the header, but I was waiting for an answer to my follow-up question addressed to NadVolume. It seems that Wrongfilter gives a positive answer, by two theoretical examples: the wobbling drop of water, and the rotating barbell (besides the empirical example of a pair of orbiting black holes). HOTmag (talk) 19:21, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

How is the center of mass of the rotating barbell not at rest? The distribution of mass in the volume it rotates within changes, but if it's rotating around the center of mass, isn't the center of mass stationary? -- Avocado (talk) 22:28, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

There may be a misunderstanding here about what a gravitational wave is like. It does not push and pull in the direction from which it comes - it is polarized and squishes and stretches at right angles to its path. If what the observer sees is symmetric then they won't see gravitational waves. NadVolum (talk) 23:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

datetime for cub birth

[8] when did this happen. date? time? story out oct-21 but it doesn't say time of event. .... it's for news. -- Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 04:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Such news articles are based on press releases put out by the organizations featured in the news, in this case Cotswold Wildlife Park. Large parts of it are taken from a "Park News" item on Cotswold's website. The latter also does not mention when the young was born. The release date of this news item was likely inspired by World Lemur Day being celebrated on the last Friday of October, this year 25 October, and a reasonable guess it was released just before the article in The Guardian was published, which has publication date 20 October. The "Park News" item features a photo whose caption reads, "The Greater Bamboo Lemur Baby bred at Cotswold Wildlife Park – aged 5 weeks", so the baby probably arrived near mid-September. Since the park has successfully bred more than 70 lemurs,^[9] this is not Earth-shattering news that deserves careful attention.  --Lambiam 06:10, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for checking. The 5 weeks age helps. Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 06:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Why do we use 12 o'clock to represent midnight and noon?

It occurred to me recently that the way we number and label hours is rather odd. We divide the day into two twelve-hour sections, starting at midnight and noon, but we number the hours starting an hour after that. This leads to various oddities: 11am is followed by 12pm, not 12am; likewise 11pm is followed by 12am (something that people often get confused about). 11:59pm and 12:01am are different days, despite the numbering logically implying that they are part of the same day. If the 12-hour clock was invented now, I suspect we would define midnight and noon as zero hours, but the concept of 12-hour semi-days predates the concept of zero. But given the way things were typically numbered in the absence of zero, and the way we still number dates, it occurred to me that it would be more sensible, and more expected, to use 1 o'clock to mark the start of the day, and the start of the afternoon. (That would give us a morning running from 1:00am to 12:59am, and an afternoon running from 1:00pm to 12:59pm. No weird flipping between am and pm at 12, all consecutive numbers are in the same semi-day). So I'm wondering: why was the modern notation adopted? I've looked at 12-hour clock and Hour but they don't explain why this system was adopted, only that it started to become common in the 14th century, displacing the earlier system of using twelve (seasonally-varying) hours for the period of sunrise to sunset. Iapetus (talk) 15:12, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

This doesn't answer your question, but in Japanese usage 午前12時 ("12am") means noon and 午後12時 ("12pm") means midnight. Also possible are 午前0時 ("0am") for midnight and 午後0時 ("0pm") for noon. :) Double sharp (talk) 15:17, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Japanese time is high IQ! Not only does it do XX:XX to 24:00 like much of the world instead of XX:XX to 0:00 or 00:00 it also does things like this bar's open 16:00 to 28:00 or "trains run till 25:00". Mechanical clocks once had only hour hands and had to have their drift fixed every day with a glance at a sundial, it took a long time for people to stop thinking in Roman numerals and "this is the first hour" instead of "it's 12:27". If all civilizations had 0 clocks would probably not illogically have a 1 at the top instead of 0. Also am and pm mean ante and post meridian, they CAN'T change at 1:00. After the noon meridian not midnight cause the Sun's midnight meridian crossing is invisible unless midnight is in the day. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 16:15, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 15

Is this really a prime-generating polynomial?

In this article, an inequality involving a set of Diophantine equations is given as an example. But does that even qualify as a "formula for primes"? It looks more like a primality test of sorts, ie iff the inequality holds then (k + 2) is prime, so one would still need to generate a likely prime candidate to begin with. Which brings me to the next issue. Setting all of the variables to positive integers and then k to "some prime minus two", the inequality fails regardless. So there must be some special set of rules for selecting the values for each variable? Earl of Arundel (talk) 20:48, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The inequality only fails if one of the terms isn't zero. If all terms are zero, then the polynomial evaluates to k+2. Thus, the set of primes is precisely the set of positive values taken by this function. The arguments needed to produce the primes are not constructed, but one imagines plotting the function for all integer values of the arguments. Tito Omburo (talk) 21:59, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't quite understand. I thought none of the 26 variables could be zero? Also, the fact that "the primes are not constructed" leads me to believe that this is indeed not a "prime-generating polynomial" per se. Is that correct? Earl of Arundel (talk) 23:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The terms alpha_i have a simultaneously zero only when k+2 is prime. So the sum of the squares of the alpha_i always exceeds one unless k+2 is prime. I don't know what "prime generating polynomial" means. This is certainly a polynomial whose range in the positive integers consists only of the primes. Tito Omburo (talk) 23:06, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps it's not that obvious from the article, but the polynomial is not meant to be a practical method for generating primes. Plugging in random values for the variables will give positive, hence prime, values only a small fraction of the time. Finding values of the variables for which the polynomial is positive will be at least as difficult as just computing primes using conventional methods. The point is demonstrate that such a function is possible, but that doesn't mean you'd actually use it. It's possible to program a Turing machine to compute √2 to 10 decimals, but that doesn't mean you should go out and buy a Turing machine if you want to know the diagonal of a square. --RDBury (talk) 04:46, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Speaking of that, some years ago I wrote a program to try to find a prime (any prime) by plugging in values for the variables. It ran for hours without finding a 26-tuple that works. Are there any 26-tuples known that yield a prime? Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 06:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

The 11 variables $b,c,d,f,i,o,r,s,t,v,w$ are each used in only one equation, and the 2 variables $h,j$ are used in just two equations, so you can try to solve for these after plugging in 2 less than the value of some prime for $k$ and nonnegative integer values for the 12 other variables. This reduces the search space from $\aleph _{0}^{26}$ to $\aleph _{0}^{12}$ :).  --Lambiam 14:50, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't think about coming from the other end. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 23:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

You can in fact go further in conquering the space. After assigning values to just the two of $a$ and $e,$ the value of $e^{3}(e+2)(a+1)^{2}+1$ needs to be a square, otherwise the equation for $\alpha _{4}$ cannot be solved and you must backtrack and try other values for $a$ and $e.$ If the value is a square, you now also have the value of $o.$ Next, assign a value to $y$ and do likewise with $\alpha _{5}$ to either backtrack or solve for $x.$ And likewise with $\ell$ and $\alpha _{8}$ to solve for $m.$ The remaining system is still formidable but less insuperable.  --Lambiam 09:01, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, I might get back to this one day. I'd like to see an example that gives a prime. Bubba73 ^{You talkin' to me?} 02:15, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I think I understand now. So for any given prime (k + 2), there will be some set of positive values for which the inequality is guaranteed to hold true. Got it! Amazing that you were able to isolate those variables, too. How on Earth do you do it? Touche! I am still slogging through the basic maths, lol.... Earl of Arundel (talk) 02:01, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I used a little program to tabulate for each subset of variables in which set of equations it was used (excluding variables already listed in a smaller subset), as well as how many distinct variables were used in each equation. The things I mentioned were staring me in the face. Perhaps more elementary algebra can be applied to limit the search, but I looked no further. Considerations based on nodular arithmetic may also help.  --Lambiam 13:03, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

The section describes a prime-generating inequality. Its terms are polynomials, so this inequality is a polynomial inequality, The bracketing is not as in "[prime-generating polynomial] inequality", but as in "prime-generating [polynomial inequality]". To make the inequality actually produce primes, one has to turn the crank really hard.  --Lambiam 05:13, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Crank the handle really hard? Ha ha, that's for sure!. If you want to go through all single digit combinations of values for the 26 variables you have 10^26 different possibilities. That'll take half a lifetime even on an exaflop supercompute and perhaps you'll get the primes 2,3,5,7. Two digits would take 10^26 longer. The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy's Deep Thought would have nothing on it. NadVolum (talk) 23:13, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

Names of n-1 dimensional parts of Pascal's simplexes

The points in Pascal's line are simply points. (Pascal's line, the 1-dimensional version, is simply 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1 infinitely long. The 0-dimensional version, Pascal's point, is simply the number 1.)

The lines in Pascal's triangle are rows. The triangles in Pascal's tetrahedron are layers.

What are the tetrahedrons in Pascal's pentachoron?? What are the pentachorons in Pascal's hexateron?? And so on. Georgia guy (talk) 14:59, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

While we do have an article on Pascal's simplex, it's completely unsourced and almost all the work of a single editor. So there's really no evidence that there's any kind of standard terminology for these ideas. The name "Pascal's triangle" is well-established, but higher and lower analogues not so much. The good news is that you can define your own terminology with little chance of confusing anyone by going against existing usage. I personally don't see anything wrong with using "layers" for the tetrahedron and above. In some contexts you can talk about "slices" of multidimensional objects, and that may be applicable here as well. Either way, you'd need to define your terms to be clear about what you're talking about. --RDBury (talk) 16:23, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

52nd perfect number

How many digits (I want an exact figure) does the 52nd perfect number have?? Georgia guy (talk) 13:11, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

If you read the perfect number article you will see that only 51 perfect numbers are known. So nobody knows. 196.50.199.218 (talk) 13:38, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Please, I learned this morning that a new perfect number has been discovered. Georgia guy (talk) 13:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Although a possible 52nd Mersenne prime has been discovered, its primality has not been ascertained and its identity has not been released, so we cannot construct a perfect number from it yet. Also, after the 48th Mersenne prime, we get into unverified territory, meaning that there may be additional Mersenne numbers between the Mersenne primes we know about that are also prime, but that we missed. GalacticShoe (talk) 13:42, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

It was revealed this morning to be prime. Georgia guy (talk) 13:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, do you have the value of $n$ that they found produces the new prime $2^{n}-1$? If so then the number of digits is going to be $\lfloor \log _{10}(2^{n-1}(2^{n}-1))\rfloor +1=\lfloor (n-1)\log _{10}(2)+\log _{10}(2^{n}-1)\rfloor +1\approx \lceil (2n-1)\log _{10}(2)\rceil$. GalacticShoe (talk) 13:53, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

GalacticShoe, I don't want a formula; I want an answer; I believe it's more than 80 million but I want an exact figure. Georgia guy (talk) 13:55, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I see someone has updated the Mersenne prime page with the value $n=136279841$. If you plug that into the formula I provided, you get $82048640$ digits. GalacticShoe (talk) 14:00, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

@GalacticShoe: I added your figure to List of Mersenne primes and perfect numbers. Still need the digits of the perfect number, though. :) Double sharp (talk) 14:29, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, Double sharp. Unfortunately, I don't think my computer could handle that kind of number so I'll have to deign to someone else for this one :) GalacticShoe (talk) 14:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, we only need the first six and last six digits for consistency in the table. Wolfram Alpha is giving me 388692 for the first six digits, and it must end in ...008576 by computing modulo 10⁶.

And now I realise that the GIMPS press release links to a zip file containing the perfect number as well. Oops. Well, nice to know for sure that the above is correct. Double sharp (talk) 14:52, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Now that I think further, it's actually pretty simple to find the first 6 digits, since all you have to do is take $136279841$, plug it into $a=(2n-1)\log _{10}(2)$ to get the approximate base-10 exponent of the perfect number, then find the first six digits of $10^{a-b}$ where $b$ is an integer offset that allows us to scale the perfect number down by an arbitrary power of 10. Doing so with $b=82048634$ yields the aforementioned $388692$. GalacticShoe (talk) 15:08, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Using home-brewed routines, I get 3886924435...7330008576. I can produce some more digits if desired, up to several hundreds, but not all 82048640 of them.  --Lambiam 17:01, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 8

Ottoman 15th century Molla Lutfî, Pl. help confirm

Draft:Molla Lutfi was a 15th century Ottoman scholar, Pl. help confirm following:

1) tr:Molla Lutfî is different from Lutfi (court official) ?

2) Date and year of execution, RS sources I came across seem to give 1494 (possibly December 24) as date of execution where as tr:Molla Lutfî seem to give January 23, 1495 as date of death please help confirm which is more likely to be correct one?

3) Molla Lutfi was executed at Hippodrome of Constantinople or Covered Hippodrome?

4) The Reference number 9 in "Crafting History: Essays on the Ottoman World and Beyond in Honor of Cemal Kafadar. Germany, Academic Studies Press, 2023." refers to a letter compiled in Tokapi Palace Museum archive E 8101/1 which had complained that Lutfi to have had stolen nefis books from collection of late Sinan Pasha, who was mentor to Lutfi. A corroborating ref is preferred saying wording used in the letter meant 'stolen' since late Sinan Pasha was a close mentor of Lutfi.

5) Last but not least, I would also request list of Molla Lufti's books with Arabic and roman script nomenclatures and translations of the names, if possible.

Bookku (talk) 03:06, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Bookku, the difference between 24 December 1494 and 23 January 1495 is too great for solely Julian–Gregorian conversion to account for, but that may be part of the discrepancy. I've noticed that English language sources seem to prefer Julian where other languages tend to prefer Proleptic Gregorian. If you determine this is part of the problem, you may wish to include the other calendar's date in a footnote like we did at Zhu Yuanzhang to prevent people from changing it to be "consistent" with their own language sources. Folly Mox (talk) 18:02, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Why would any reference use Proleptic Gregorian? That's saying, "this is the date it would have been if Pope Gregory had decreed the new calendar earlier than he actually did - except he didn't". There's obviously a case for converting Julian dates to Gregorian in cases where the country concerned had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar; that can apply from 1582 onwards. But going backwards from 1582 makes no sense; the new calendar was not retrospective, and Julian dates right up to Wednesday 4 October 1582 are correct and should not be converted. That that date was immediately followed by Thursday 15 October 1582 as the first day of the new Gregorian calendar was just a result of correcting the discrepancies that had built up over 15 centuries. There was always meant to be a disconnection, the famous 10-day gap (which increased every century the longer it took for countries to convert). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:36, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Cultures that did not start out with the Julian calendar (Chinese calendar, Islamic calendar, e.g.) have a choice to make when converting pre-Gregorian dates to use a Western calendar, and many sources make the reasonable choice of using Proleptic Gregorian for consistency and ease of calculation rather than having to remember and account for the 1582 reform. Folly Mox (talk) 11:44, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

(ec) In the 15th-century sources, which are written in Ottoman Turkish, all dates are given in the Islamic calendar. I suppose that present-day scholars, translating such dates to a form accessible to their readership, see no reason to use another calendar that was current in the 15th century but is antiquated now.  --Lambiam 11:47, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

I get what you are both saying. I suppose it makes a kind of sense if those sources are considered in isolation. But the moment you introduce events in other countries around the same times, and those countries were using the Julian calendar, hey presto! there's an instant mismatch between the dates, making it seem as if one event preceded the other by up to 10 days in real time when in fact they were coincident. That seems less than useful as an aid to scholarship. Also, the conversion they use seems to be based on the view that Julian dates up to 4 October 1582 were somehow "inaccurate" and need to be corrected. That's just not so. Yes, the calendar itself got out of synch over a period of centuries, which is why Gregory decreed a new one - but the labels that were actually given to days before then (i.e. the dates) were the ones that the entire Western world used, the only official and correct ones (which were NOT retrospectively adjusted by Gregory's reform), and to fiddle with them from the lofty perspective of 20th-21st century scholarship seems somewhat wrong-headed, imo. It may sometimes be helpful to make it clear that, e.g. 15 July 1374 was a date in the Julian calendar. That's the solution, if one were required. But to convert that to 25 July in the Proleptic Gregorian is a step too far, and in the wrong direction. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:36, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Bookku, according to Lutfi (court official), [Lutfi's] letter was "written in the middle of the month of Cemazi the Second in the year three and seventy and nine hundred²" which roughly translates to August 1565-6. (Where ² is a malformed citing "Casale pg 70", and Casale authored two works cited...) Anyway this seems to exclude identity between the two subjects (they also have different Wikidata QIDs, although no overlapping authority control IDs to help verify). Folly Mox (talk) 11:55, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Also the tr.wp article links Hippodrome of Constantinople (technically, tr:Sultanahmet Meydanı; I just checked the language switcher), in re your question 3. Folly Mox (talk) 12:01, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

(ec) The article on the scholar on the Turkish Wikipedia identifies the place of execution unambiguously as the Hippodrome of Constantinople. I don't think the Covered Hippodrome was then still extant.  --Lambiam 12:08, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Gregorian calendar date January 23, 1495 corresponds to Julian calendar date January 14, 1495 or 1494. The uncertainty in the year is due to the fact that the new year did not everywhere start on January 1st; see Julian calendar § New Year's Day. In England, March 24, 1494 was followed by March 25, 1495. Both dates fall in April 1495 with Gregorian reckoning.  --Lambiam 05:20, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Date conversions seem bit confusing to me. Trying to study and understand. Bookku (talk) 05:30, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

What's confusing is the use of the proleptic Gregorian calendar. If sources actually employ this, they're doing a disservice to their readers, imo. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:18, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

October 9

Difference between marriage in the USA and “elsewhere”?

Hello from France to the Reference Desk Users. My « strange » question comes from the end of Andrea Dworkin's strange quote in a book about “The Economics of Sex” (I can't find the exact title): “A man wants what a woman has - her sex. He can steal it (rape), convince her to give it to him (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it long-term (marriage in the US), or acquire it outright (marriage in most countries of the world).” I read that quotation in Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (a translated book to French). My question concerns the words in bold.
I'll take the risk of trying to answer my question: Could this be an allusion to the fact that, statistically, marriages end much (?) more often in the USA than elsewhere in divorce, followed by marriages, then divorce, then marriages, sometimes with the same person (rare in France, I think?). Thank you for your matrimonial cogitations. Jojodesbatignoles (talk) 12:04, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Andrea was kind of "damaged", and it's hard to tell what she thought she was getting at. But if you google "divorce rate in france vs us", for example, you'll find they are comparable. A century ago and more, divorces were much harder to get in America, and probably elsewhere as well. You couldn't just say "we want a divorce". You had to show "cause", which led to bitterly contested trials. (That still happens sometimes.) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:03, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

However, since colonial times, divorce laws in British North America / The United States were much more rational than the horrible pre-1857 divorce system in England, and during parts of U.S. history, there has been a state with noticeably laxer divorce laws than most of the other states (Indiana during part of the 19th century, Nevada during much of the 20th century). AnonMoos (talk) 19:50, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

This would be my assumption, a sarcastic allusion to the serial marriage practice found particularly among the rich and powerful. I doubt that Dworkin undertook a serious statistical examination comparing the US with other Western countries in the 1970s, or whenever she penned these words. (Rather unscholarly, neither Pinker nor others quoting these sentences provide a traceable bibliographic citation that allows me to date this passage.)  --Lambiam 14:01, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, as P. G. Wodehouse wrote in Summer Moonshine, "Like so many substantial citizens of America, he had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag." Deor (talk) 16:05, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

• The original seems to be called "Sexual Economics: The Terrible Truth", possibly first published in 1972 in Ms.. Having skimmed the article, she never explains that aside remark - she actually talks mostly about socialist Czechoslovakia and the USSR in the rest of the piece. Some modern quotations of her adapt the quote to "lease it over the long-term (modern marriage/relationship) or own it outright (traditional marriage)" That said, 1972 was just after the first no-fault divorce law was passed in the United States (in California), and looking at Divorce law by country, slightly before most European countries (which liberalized in the mid 70s. Smurrayinchester 14:12, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

This is the full original quote:

In fucking, as in reproduction, sex and econom ics are inextricably joined. In male-supremacist cultures, women are believed to embody carnality; women are sex. A man wants what a woman has—sex. He can steal it (rape), persuade her to give it away (seduction), rent it (prostitution), lease it over the long term (marriage in the United States), or own it outright (marriage in most societies). A man can do some or all of the above, over and over again.

It is indeed from "Sexual Economics: The Terrible Truth", first given as a speech to women at Harper & Row in 1976, and later published by Ms. in what Dworkin calls an "edited" version (her air quotes). The full original speech is published in Letters From a War Zone (1989). See p. 120. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:22, 9 October 2024 (UTC)

Economics certainly figure into it, for example ugly rich guys getting pretty women. That's a universal truth. Did Dworkin ever elaborate on her perceived differences between American and other marriages? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:40, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes economics figures into everything and that's a truth, but what's supposedly this universal truth? How about a source? Where in pre-20th-century history was it not true that a rich and high status person, regardless of superficial appearance or indeed gender, could not exert comparable influence on any in the lower classes? In the 21st century so-called-middle-class of developed economies, are there numbers on those who would sell themselves into the described effective rape and slavery to marry those in the uppermost socioeconomic classes? These are all economic questions that are hardly universal, which is the point others are making of how this was an aside remark. SamuelRiv (talk) 05:12, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

A source for the obvious? What color is the sky in your world? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:51, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Marriage and divorce ratios in selected countries: 1960 to 1992 shows that the divorce rate in the USA was more than double that of any Western European nation throughout the late 20th century. Alansplodge (talk) 11:43, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Even before that, the ease of divorce in some of those there United States was proverbial. "King's Moll Renoed in Wolsey's Home Town". DuncanHill (talk) 17:32, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

It's pretty much a modern expression of an old theory of Marx's. He was writing polemically at the time—hyperbolically, even, perhaps with an element of tongue-in-cheek for the worthy tailors—but the topic is similar:

Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives ... Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common.

Dworkin's was an updated working, in theme and language, but the hyperbole is akin. SerialNumber54129 12:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

The issue is not, however, the hyperbolic nature of Dworkin's passage, or the contrast between bourgeois and proletariat, but the alleged contrast between the US and "most societies", something Marx is mum about.  --Lambiam 15:03, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Freud had something to say about Marx's Mum. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:13, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

References

October 11

"The white one"

Who is the white one in myth? In Egypt,: Krauss says "For White One as a synonym for the eastern eye of Horus, cf the Hymns to the Diadem, above." Adolf Erman 1911 gives only one result for "der Weiße". Krauss didn't mention which of the 600-some pages. Any help? (And where does Hathi get off restricting downloads of materials marked public domain?) Temerarius (talk) 03:24, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Temerarius (talk) 03:24, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

See Hedjet. 196.50.199.218 (talk) 05:38, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I see it. Now what?

Temerarius (talk) 19:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Maybe, depending on the context of the article you're working on, the next step is to reframe your question from Who is the white one in myth? to "What is the White One in ancient Egyptian tradition?"

If that step is taken, then Hedjet is your answer. If your context does not allow for that interpretation, perhaps more information would help people zero in on an aswer that meets your requirements. Folly Mox (talk) 19:50, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Was their east the same as our east?

Temerarius (talk) 17:01, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with ancient Egyptian cartography and orienteering. Are you consulting documents in the original Egyptian? I'd imagine translators would likely interpret this correctly, unless like me they suffer directional dyslexia.

I speculate that Egyptians may have used "East" to refer to other cultures that were more northerly / northeasterly than strictly East, which I base on no research whatsoever.

Would you be willing to share the context for these questions? You done got me curious. Folly Mox (talk) 10:44, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

It's actually a few things, in part I'm wondering if there's a lunar or solar quality to the whtite one. It sounds like the moon, but here pages 228-9 make me think dawn < radiate/radiant might be the source meaning.

Temerarius (talk) 02:04, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I found a page about a tomb which has the phrase "the southern (theologically east) wall".  Card Zero  (talk) 22:59, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

It being public domain means that if you get your hands on it, then you can freely redistribute it. It doesn't mean that anyone else is obliged to give it to you... AnonMoos (talk) 14:08, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Just came across a minor "white one" reference in Petrie's Anhas el Medineh. Next to a more cross-culturally familiar title "lady of heaven." https://i.postimg.cc/VNsTJcLM/image.png

Temerarius (talk) 20:58, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

0 with Roman numerals

In the Sola Busca tarot, the Fool has number 0 alongside the other trumps with Roman numerals. The existence of such a combination is not mentioned in Roman numerals#Zero. Are there other examples? When did this first occur, as far as we know? --KnightMove (talk) 12:16, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

• 
  0 – Mato
• 
  I – Panfilio
• 
  II – Postumio
• 
  III – Lenpio

KnightMove (talk) 12:16, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

@KnightMove: Also see The Fool (tarot card). SerialNumber54129 13:02, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

The ancient Romans didn't really have a concept of zero as a numerical digit in ordinary reckoning (though of course they had several words meaning "nothing"), and a zero numerical digit symbol would not have been needed or useful when writing positive numbers with Roman numerals. The closest they had to a positional notation system was sexagesimal (base-60) and was mainly used by astronomers. The sexagesimal system had a limited internal zero (used when flanked by other numbers on both sides, to indicate an empty place). AnonMoos (talk) 14:01, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

See 0#Transmission to Europe. Arabic numerals including 0 were introduced to Western Europe early in the 13th century, so any time from then on an individual using Roman numerals (and they are of course still in active use today) might have found it convenient to combine 0 with them. Some may have known of classical Greek use of omicron (ο) when working with Babylonian texts that had a 'placeholder' zero symbol, and Hipparchus, Ptolemy and other astronomers' use of the Hellenistic zero (see 0#Classical antiquity) (which the Romans failed to adopt into Roman numerals) around 150 CE (mentioned in the 0 article): I can't reproduce it here, but it comprised a long 'overline' above a tiny circle. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 20:25, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

By the magic of unicode: 𐆊, U+1018A GREEK ZERO SIGN. This is also at the top of the article Greek Numerals.  Card Zero  (talk) 20:48, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Amusingly, that (like several other characters in the article) doesn't render on my PC: presumably I lack the font. No matter, because I don't myself need to. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 04:26, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

It looks like this: , a small circle with a long overbar.  --Lambiam 09:08, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

The first font I install on any new computer is Unifont for precisely this kind of purpose. SamuelRiv (talk) 19:50, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for that information. Maybe someone knows a specific example of "any time from then on an individual using Roman numerals (and they are of course still in active use today) might have found it convenient to combine 0 with them".? --KnightMove (talk) 16:19, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

It may be that both (a) this late 15th century tarot is actually the first such example, and (b) you are the first person to have wondered about this point. I have not been able to find any work mentioning it; probably the expertise of a scholar specialising in Mediaeval MSS is needed.

For tangential interest, I have while searching encountered a 52-page work The Elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography by Adriano Cappelli, translated by David Heiman & Richard Kay, University of Kansas Libraries 1982 (googling the title gives access to downloadable pdfs). It doesn't address this particular question, but may be of interest nonetheless. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 19:42, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

If a modern example is of use to you, not the earliest (it seems you asked for both?), see Shepherd Gate Clock.  Card Zero  (talk) 22:11, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Very interesting, thank you both! --KnightMove (talk) 08:55, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I think the existence of such examples was worth to be added to the article. --KnightMove (talk) 15:07, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

It is not clear, though, that the creator of the deck thought of his use of the mark "0" as being a Roman numeral. Rather, I think it quite plausible that the creator, lacking a Roman numeral for zero, decided to use a large Arabic numeral instead.  --Lambiam 18:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

October 12

Graham Greene and R. L. Stevenson as "cousins"

Our article on Graham Greene (citing a biography) says that his mother Marion Raymond Greene (1872-1959, the daughter of Carleton Greene and Jane Whytt Elizabeth Anne Wilson) was a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson. This source specifies they were first cousins. R.L.S.'s grandparents are well known: 1) Robert Stevenson (1750-1852) and his wife Jean Smith, 2) Rev. Lewis Balfour and his wife Henrietta Scott Smith. The names like Greene and Wilson are not listed among R.L.S.'s ancestors, as well as the Scottish names like Stevenson and Balfour are absent among Marion Raymond's ancestors. Could anyone clarify this mystery? Ghirla^-трёп- 23:36, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

The ODNB says "Greene, (Henry) Graham (1904–1991), author, was born on 2 October 1904 at St John's, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, the fourth of six children of Charles Henry Greene (1865–1942), teacher, and his wife and cousin, Marion Raymond (1872–1959), eldest daughter of the Revd Carleton Greene, whose wife, Jane Wilson, was a first cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson." - so Graham Greene's grand-mother was a first cousin of RLS. DuncanHill (talk) 23:54, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Indeed, Jane's mother Marion Balfour (1811-1884) was the daughter of the above-mentioned Lewis Balfour! Ghirla^-трёп- 00:06, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

That means that Greene was RLS's first cousin twice removed. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:40, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Well found out, I didn't get there yet. What's your source? Gratuitous extra details: robert-louis-stevenson.org has him attending cousin Jane's marriage in Cockfield, Suffolk, in 1870, and cockfield.org.uk confirms that these (Jane and her sister Maud) were the English cousins mentioned in our article, who he was visiting in 1873.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:23, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Try this link. Ghirla^-трёп- 10:04, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

October 13

Musical score on keyboard and PC

I was playing a Yamaha dgx-670, I pressed the "score" button, and was displeased to see there's not an option to have the digital display's staff show the keys you're hitting. Is there a keyboard with that feature? But more immediately, what's a well-regarded PC or browser app to make a score? Failing that, to print totally custom blank score sheets? Temerarius (talk) 00:48, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I often hear LilyPond mentioned.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:56, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I've had the (proprietary and now ancient) Sibelius v1.4 for many years, but later versions seem fairly unwieldy. Compared to the professional Sibelius with its full GUI, the text-based Lilypond by itself is fairly slow and tedious, but Frescobaldi (software) provides a front end (Win, MacOS, Linux), which I haven't tried yet. See also List of scorewriters and Comparison of scorewriters. For basic stuff I used to use Cakewalk Express 3.01, (NB Windows 3.1, 8-character file names etc.) It's still available here. If you want step-time or real-time MIDI input, to show on screen what what you're playing, free-ish MuseScore seems to fit the bill but I've never tried it. Most of these programs have a fairly steep learning curve involved. The more music theory you know, the better. MinorProphet (talk) 09:10, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I've always used Mozart the music processor. ColinFine (talk) 16:21, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Pasternak imprisoned?

A question has been raised at Talk:Hamlet on screen whether a source is correct in asserting that Pasternak and Smoktunovski had been imprisoned by Stalin. See what is currently the last topic on that talk page, but also the one above it, from over a decade before. It seems probable anon is right but, while I accept that sources don't need to be in the English language, I personally cannot verify anything written in another language. Can anyone here help to resolve that? If it proves wrong I expect the right solution is to simply remove the offending sentence rather than replacing it. AndyJones (talk) 11:05, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I've answered there, having checked the Google books copy of the source. It doesn't say he was imprisoned, rather that "both the translator of the text, Boris Pasternak, and the actor playing Hamlet, Innokenti Smoktunovski, had bitter experience of Stalin's regime" DuncanHill (talk) 11:21, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

See also Doctor Zhivago for more info for his "experiences". It was his mistress Olga Ivinskaya who had been in the Gulag under Stalin. MinorProphet (talk) 12:25, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

October 14

New Spain

Block evasion
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
What was the penal colony for the State enemies in New Spain until the Spanish domination's end?

Execution by garrote?
Sleigh (talk) 11:02, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Apparently, there were no penal colonies as such, convicts worked where they were needed:

In Spanish America penal servitude followed the peninsular model with the exception that the line between public and private interests was blurred. In Spain convicts could be used only in projects deemed to be in the interest of the state; for example, they labored on the galleys and in the presidios in the service of the king and were under military control and jurisdiction. In the New World there was no such distinction, and anything that helped to further develop the economy was deemed in the public interest. Faced with a severe shortage of labor because of the decline in Indian population from the middle of the sixteenth century, the colonial courts sentenced men to terms of service at hard labor and then turned them over to private employers who used them in mines, factories and mills.

Penal Servitude in the Spanish Empire: Presidio Labor in the Eighteenth Century - Hispanic American Historical Review (1978)

Alansplodge (talk) 11:39, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Leonid Ogarev

Block evasion.
The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.
Are there info about the full life of the one who tried to assassinate Stalin in 1931? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 193.207.179.195 (talk) 21:34, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Where have you seen anything about that guy? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

The article "The 4 times they tried to assassinate Stalin says he was "a former White Guard officer, a member of the Russian All-Military Union organization of emigres and, moreover, a British intelligence agent." Reliable source? Who knows. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:29, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

October 15

Aircraft carrier near 8G78+MR Camp Pendleton North, California

I spotted an aircraft carrier near 8G78+MR Camp Pendleton North, California around Oct 14th 8:20 AM local time. I did not have any binoculars or scopes so I could not make out any identifying marks. Is there any online public information on which carrier this might have been?

From this site[10], it might have been CVN 68, 70, or 71. That's all I've been able to find so far. Epideurus (talk) 01:52, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

According to Navy news, the only carrier close enough to Southern California to be seen is USS Nimitz (CVN-68). Nearby, USS Tripoli (LHA-7) is in Northern California and USS George Washington (CVN-73) is near Southern California, but too far from shore to be seen. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 13:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you! I did google quite a bit beforehand, but there were many purported "US carrier tracker" sites and it was hard to tell which one was correct. Epideurus (talk) 20:11, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Proletariat, etymology

Please see this quote from Terry Eagleton's "Why Marx was Right?" published in 2011.

"The word ‘‘proletariat’’ comes to us from the Latin word for ‘‘offspring,’’ meaning those who were too poor to serve the state with anything but their wombs. Too deprived to contribute to economic life in any other way, these women produced labour power in the form of children."

In ancient Rome, the Latin form of the modern expression carried the meaning of people having no other property than their children, according to many sources. None mentions it has anything to do with womb or giving birth. The sources I checked would rather suggest a destitute class of the society rather than a female section of that class. Eagleton cites no source. Anybody knows any scholarly source suggesting a meaning akin to Eagleton's? Thanks for any information. Narrativist (talk) 05:31, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The word "proletariat" comes from French "prolétariat", which is derived from Latin "proletarius"

• In ancient Rome, "proletarius" referred to a citizen of the lowest class, whose only contribution to the state was their offspring (proles)

• The Latin word "proles" means "offspring" or "progeny"

• Breaking it down further:

"Proles" comes from the Proto-Indo-European root *pro-al-, composed of:

• pro- meaning "forth"

• al- meaning "to grow, nourish"

The modern political and economic sense of "proletariat" to mean the working class or wage-earners emerged in the mid-19th century.

It was notably used by Karl Marx and gained prominence in Marxist theory to refer to the class of wage workers engaged in industrial production.

References

--136.56.165.118 (talk) 06:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Many dictionaries use this phrase "only contribution to the state". For instance, I looked at Chambers's from 1908 (since it's on Gutenberg), same phrase. I assume they all come from the same source, perhaps a Roman author? It carries a strange inbuilt assumption about Romans having a raison d'être of supporting their hive, like ants. Proletarians seem to be specific to the Centuriate assembly.  Card Zero  (talk) 08:18, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I got to know as much but my question is, are there any sources saying that the expression had a female specific meaning in ancient Rome. Narrativist (talk) 09:27, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

If there are other sources with the same misunderstanding, they probably are based on a common source whose wording was, perhaps, ambiguous. The Latin noun proletarius is masculine; there is no noun *proletarias from which one might surmise prolétariat, first attested in 1832, to have been derived. Lewis & Short write: "According to a division of the people by Servius Tullius, a citizen of the lowest class, who served the State not with his property, but only with his children (proles), a proletary".^[11]  --Lambiam 17:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I suspect that the specific references to women and their wombs is Eagleton's own poetic flourish (which though florid is not factually inaccurate) rather than a reflection of exact wording in any original source. Since he's still a practising academic, you could always try asking him directly. {The poster formerly known as 87.812.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:52, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Poetic or not, it is bound to mislead readers unfamiliar with Ancient Roman civilization. The formulation "these women" rather explicitly restricts the Roman citizens considered to be proletarians to members of the female sex. But Ancient Rome was thoroughly patriarchal; the status of a woman was that of her husband (or father, if still unmarried). The division by Servius Tullius (and any similar classifications of the citizenship) ignored the female half of the citizenship. Non-proletarians contributed by the tax on their property, levied on the (male) head of the household.  --Lambiam 07:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I think you're over-reading Eagleton's intent: the wives and daughters of proletarians were themselves of the proletarian class (as you say), and they (not their husbands/fathers) were the ones with wombs. I suggest Eagleton wants to tug at the heartstrings by setting up a resonance with wombs, labour (geddit?) and children: he isn't setting out a textbook definition of the Roman proletariat or of the word's etymology. I don't, by the way, endorse his approach (I doubt I'd agree with him on virtually anything), I'm merely explaining why I don't think there's any point in Narrativist looking for mentions of wombs in the contemporary sources. {The poster formerly known as 87.812.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 09:34, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I did email Eagleton but no reply came from him. From what we get to know, his seemingly intellectual dash is far from being accurate. Ideology blinds, I guess. I would rather call it sloppy. Thanks for your take on the matter. Narrativist (talk) 17:49, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

@Lambiam You threw much light on the question. Thanks. Narrativist (talk) 17:52, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Women's suffrage in Afghanistan

I wonder where the information that Women's suffrage in Afghanistan was introduced in 1919 comes from? I have often seen the claim that women where given the wote in Afghanistan in 1919 in online discussions, debates, blogs, online comments, etc. But this is never claimed in any reference text book anywhere. On the contrary, text books always state that women in Afghanistan was given the vote in 1964. Where does the 1919 claim come from? Is it some sort of internet myth? --Aciram (talk) 16:47, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, I can point you to one textbook which states that Afghan women were given the vote in 1919, had it revoked in 1929, and regained it in 1964 ([12]); and to another which says more vaguely that the right of women to vote, initially granted in 1919, "was revoked and reinstated several times before most recently being implemented in 2004" ([13]). --Antiquary (talk) 17:37, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Interesting. Did Afghanistan have a parlamentary system in 1919? Did men vote in 1919? --Aciram (talk) 18:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

• Previous thread on the same subject Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Humanities/2021 July 28#Women's suffrage in Afghanistan. DuncanHill (talk) 18:03, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you. Good Lord. I completely forgot about that.--Aciram (talk) 19:45, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

October 16

One beating heart

In the R. H. Benson short story 'The Watcher' we read "... I heard pealing out above all other sounds the long liquid song of a thrush somewhere above me. I looked up idly and tried to see the bird, and after a moment or two caught sight of him as the leaves of the beech parted in the breeze, his head lifted and his whole body vibrating with the joy of life and music. As some one has said, his body was one beating heart." Who was it who said "his body was one beating heart"? Thank you, DuncanHill (talk) 00:05, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Perhaps no-one before Benson. Vaguely describing a phrase in one's own prose as a quotation from some unidentified other's work is, I think, not unknown in literature. P. G. Wodehouse (for one) used to do a similar thing by having his "silly ass" characters mangle and misattribute quotes. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

If it's mangled, then who's being mangled? DuncanHill (talk) 10:48, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I said "a similar thing", not "the identical thing". I was not suggesting that this particular Benson passage is a mangled quote (though it might be).

Another possibility is that Benson had literally heard it said by someone who had not later published it, and wanted to use it but not appear to take credit for the invention of another, whom he did not wish to identify by name at this particular juncture. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 23:42, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Are you insinuating that we're in some sort of danger here ?

130.74.59.35 (talk) 14:17, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Who's in this video?

I see Biden and Harris but dont recognize the other two people Trade (talk) 01:38, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff respectively. GalacticShoe (talk) 02:45, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Their spouses. Cullen328 (talk) 06:44, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

Detective story question

Hi all. In which Nancy Spain story does a hypodermic syringe prominently figure? Cheers, SerialNumber54129 17:31, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The answer might be found in A Trouser-wearing Character: The Life and Times of Nancy Spain p. 98. Celia, Tommy, Connie, Major Bognor— R in the Month? fiveby(zero) 17:57, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks very much, fiveby, that's the one! SerialNumber54129 11:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 18

Continent?

I've created Category:Aviators by continent. The only problem is Australia and Oceania, with the latter stating "Outside of the English-speaking world, Oceania is generally considered a continent, while Australia is regarded as an island or a continental landmass within that continent." So should the category include:

1. a category for Australia (Category:Australian aviators) and another for Oceania (Category:Oceanian aviators)
2. a category just for Oceania encompassing both
3. a single category for Australia and Oceania (Category:Australian and Oceanian aviators)? Clarityfiend (talk) 04:04, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Have a look through Category:Categories_by_continent and see how others do it. Surely this isn't the first time this question has come up... --Wrongfilter (talk) 05:12, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Generally, we have Category:X of Oceania with a subcategory Category:X of Australia (e.g. Category:Arthropods of Oceania with subcategory Category:Arthropods of Australia; Category:Cinema of Oceania with subcategory Category:Pornography (!) in Australia; Category:Organizations based in Oceania with subcategory Category:Organisations based in Australia; Category:Welfare in Oceania with subcategory Category:Welfare in Australia).  --Lambiam 06:22, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Those things by continent put under Europe also things from Iceland, Mallorca and Cyprus, which are, in terms of physical geography, islands in the middle of an ocean, either not part of any continent or tiny continents of their own. Great Britain at least is connected to Europe by the continental shelf, but the other islands I mentioned aren't. So those things by continent take continent (in the social geographical sense) to mean some part of the world that usually roughly coincides with a continent in the physical geographical sense, without actually being one, in such a way that no part is left out. Just like those small islands around Europe are grouped with the European continent, all those islands in the Pacific are grouped with the Australian continent (or the Zealandia submerged continent). But Australia doesn't take such a dominant place within Oceania (although it's still the majority of the land area) and is a country of its own, so in this case the large area is called Oceania, not Australia.

Conclusion: Australia is a continent in the physical geographical sense, Oceania is one in the social geographical sense and Australia is part of it, and those things by continent use the social geographical sense. PiusImpavidus (talk) 15:45, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:53, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

USA Vice President

In the USA, a person can be President for only two terms (8 years). Is there any similar restriction for being Vice President? Thanks. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 07:45, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

No, see Vice_President_of_the_United_States#Term_of_office. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:06, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks! 32.209.69.24 (talk) 19:13, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The bit about the President having only two terms means two consecutive terms. It's still an open question whether, say, Barack Obama, having already had two consecutive terms, could be elected to a third term after the eight-year break in which Trump and Biden occupied the Oval Office. It's never happened (at least not since the Constitution was changed to prevent a repeat of the people exercising their democratic choice to elect F D Roosevelt to a third and a fourth term), and it would probably need a Supreme Court to give it the imprimatur, but many of those who know the US Constitution better than I seem to think it's permissible. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

The Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution makes no distinction between consecutive and non-consecutive terms. --Amble (talk) 21:10, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm sure this question has come up here multiple times, and I'm almost sure what I said above applies. (That's as sure as I can be given the increasing addleness of my brain).

But the 22nd Amendment definitely does not prohibit a former president from being elected vice president and then succeeding as president on the death or resignation of the incumbent. And that could happen an unlimited number of times. Because the Amendment only talks about a limit on being elected president, not on becoming president some other way. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 17:21, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Nope. Amble is correct. No one can be elected to more than 2 presidential terms, regardless of whether they are consecutive or not. And as DOR (ex-HK) points out, a person who is ineligible to be elected to the presidency (including one who has already been elected twice) is ineligible to be Vice President. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:07, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

I stand corrected. Thank you. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:06, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

In theory, I think Obama could become Speaker of the House, and then the presidency and vice-presidency could become vacant at the same time (or too quickly to replace the vice president), at which point he would become Acting President of the United States. We have never had an acting president for any extended length of time (unless you think Tyler was wrong in the first place) so this would be an uncomfortable situation and I won't venture to predict how it would be resolved. --Trovatore (talk) 21:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

An ineligible Speaker would be skipped over for the next in the succession queue, iirc the President Pro Tem of the Senate. —Tamfang (talk) 00:08, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Can you point to the text on that? The 22nd amendment doesn't actually say that anyone is ineligible to be president, only that they can't be elected president. --Trovatore (talk) 00:25, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

"As we clearly state, Obama is not eligible to be VP: "Under the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution, 'no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President [e.g., Obama!] shall be eligible to that of Vice President of the United States.'" DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 20:31, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Biden, Trump and Carter are available though. —Tamfang (talk) 19:50, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Mrs George Canninge

Mrs George Canninge, who acted under that name although her given name was Sarah, was a well-known character actress in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among other roles, she created that of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. I'd like to put together a short article about her, but I cannot discover her date of death. Grateful for any steer in the right direction. I have access to Ancestry and the British Library Newspaper archive, but have drawn a blank in both. Tim riley talk 10:19, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Alive and living with George at 35 Belsize Avenue, Bowes Park N, Southgate, Middlesex in the 1911 Census. Born Stepney 1843. DuncanHill (talk) 16:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for that. I can trace her into a bit later in the C20th and really need her date of death. But thanks nevertheless Tim riley talk 17:03, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I can't find their marriage, her maiden name, her birth, or his birth. Do we know if they were even married, was Canninge George's birth name? DuncanHill (talk) 19:51, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Traditionally in the British system, honorifics which a woman owed to being married were not put before her own first name. So Diana, Princess of Wales is correct, but Princess Diana of Wales incorrect. On the level of ordinary married women, this led to Mrs. George Canninge (see Princess Michael of Kent). AnonMoos (talk) 19:00, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

To save anyone from trying to reinvent the wheel I think I should point out that the same question was asked here three years ago and some limited progress was made. Incidentally, everyone there and here seems to have put much faith in stated ages and stated dates of birth. My own 19th-century ancestors usually gave both wrongly, and none of them had the excuse of being an actress. I advise caution. --Antiquary (talk) 13:30, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

World War II: Japanese-Americans in the Japanese military

Were there Japanese-Americans in the Japanese armed forces during World War II? 81.152.122.255 (talk) 19:28, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes. For example, see Internment of Japanese Americans#Proving commitment to the United States and the section of that article just before it. Dekimasuよ! 03:22, 19 October 2024 (UTC)Sorry, my mistake. Dekimasuよ! 08:35, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I think the OP was asking about the Japanese army, not the American army. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:48, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I found an excellent article Stranded: Nisei in Japan Before, During, and After World War II that describes several books and other resources about the experiences of Japanese Americans who happened to be in Japan at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack. Many of the young men were either conscripted into the Japanese Army or in some cases, served willingly. In one case, Iwao Peter Sano, an American citizen conscripted into the Japanese Army, spent nearly three years in a Soviet POW camp in Siberia, and later wrote a book about his experiences that was published by the University of Nebraska.

US born Tomoya Kawikata was convicted of treason after the war and his story is described in Kawakita v. United States. He was not officially in the Japanese Army but was a translator at a nickel mine under Japanese military control where American and Canadian POWs worked under exceptionally harsh conditions, and he brutalized many prisoners. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was later commuted to life in prison. In 1963, President Kennedy ordered him released as a goodwill gesture. He was deported permanently to Japan. Cullen328 (talk) 06:54, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Nice. "Brothers went to war, but not all on the same side". fiveby(zero) 15:00, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

That's right. I mean the Japanese army. 81.152.122.255 (talk) 19:35, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

This article, Stranded: Nisei in Japan Before, During, and After World War II mentions several Japanese-Americans who were conscripted into the Japanese Army, including a Seattle footballer who published The Two Worlds of Jim Yoshida. Alansplodge (talk) 13:01, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Alansplodge, "footballer" is not a term used in American English. Those who compete in Gridiron football are universally called "football players" and those who play Association football are called "soccer players" in American English. Basketball players are sometimes called "b-ballers" but this is slang usage. Cullen328 (talk) 22:51, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Basketball players are sometimes called "b-ballers" "cagers", but i didn't know why until[14][15]. Should write that down somewhere. fiveby(zero) 23:13, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

The goose, Amun-Re, and his goose, the symbol of Amun-Re

I'd love to see this item. "A New Kingdom stela from the Theban workmen's village at Deir el-Medina bears images of two geese associated with Amun-Re: one of them, described as 'the beautiful goose of Amun-Re', is an image of the sacred bird, while the other, 'Amun-Re, the beautiful goose', depicts the god himself." I couldn't google up the stela, or find it in Petries "Anhas el-Medineh", and I don't think it's the "Mona Lisa of Egypt" painting of geese from Thebes (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2021.102834), (https://images.metmuseum.org/CRDImages/eg/original/DT226227.jpg) does anybody have a tip? Temerarius (talk) 22:00, 18 October 2024 (UTC) Temerarius (talk) 22:00, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Two Amun-Re geese of different ontological status

Here ya go!  Card Zero  (talk) 03:44, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Wow, thank you! I wonder which Huy it is. Is the horizontal line hieroglyph Y1 papyrus? O34 & N37 's'?

Temerarius (talk) 16:09, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I can nearly piece together which Huy. This is catalog item 1607 in the Egyptian Museum of Turin. Item 1608 is another stela of Huy, also from Deir el-Medina. This document mentions "Stela Cat. 1609 of the chief craftsman Huy (TT 361)". I can't find that! But TT 361 is a tomb number, and Osirisnet mentions "Huy, the owner of TT361". So circumstantially it's that Huy. Not one of the famous Huys, just some Huy. "Main carpenter in the place of truth." Regarding the hieroglyphs, I think his name starts at the bottom of the column above his right hand with the tusk, followed by the tied papyrus (what does that do phonetically?) and ends with two reeds at the top of the next column (above his face). I might be totally wrong about it, but his name ought to be there somewhere, right? In which case, the tusk looks annoyingly similar to a straight horizontal line, and probably lots of the other horizontal lines are assorted different hieroglyphs engraved almost identically.

Regarding the god-and-symbol-of-god, presumably the same thing is happening here only with Amon-Ra as a ram this time.  Card Zero  (talk) 00:32, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Per Jsesh, Y1 horizontal papyrus whatsit has sound values dmD, mDAt. Maybe it's being used as a determinative for Hui the scribe in its rendering on the page Huy? Its use with F18 tongue "Hw" (et al) makes me imagine the intended meaning could be related to the concept of word, as it would have been clearer in pronunciation (helpfully redundant) to use an anthopomorphic determinative A24 or A25. Of course, you never know why someone didn't do something.

Temerarius (talk) 18:08, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

References

Presentation of national election polling in America

How come all polls in nationwide opinion polling for the 2024 United States presidential election seem to present the result as percentages of votes in the nationwide voting? Wouldn't it be more interesting to present the number of Electoral College votes each of the candidates can be foreseen to get? It is after all the Electoral College which decides who will become president. GotoGothenburg (talk) 22:38, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

They look at various things: National percentages, percentages by state, and also percentages for the "battleground" states, the so-called "purple" states, which will likely decide the election. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:19, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

@Baseball Bugs, it's not presented like that at the page I linked. It is just percentages for the national level. So your answer does not address the question. GotoGothenburg (talk) 14:26, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

That doesn't mean it couldn't be. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:06, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

That wouldn't be nationwide polling. There are many, many polls available for most states. Especially the battleground states. But you won't find those results if you are looking at nationwide polls. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 12:09, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 19

Carjacking#Prevention and response

In what parts of the world is this good advice:

• Use of the vehicle as a weapon against the car jacker, or a firearm or pepper spray.

Doug butler (talk) 06:33, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Nowhere. Those are good ways to get killed. I removed that unreferenced and ridiculous "advice" from the article. Cullen328 (talk) 07:10, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Years of service as President or Vice President (USA)

If you add up all the time that an individual served as either President or Vice President of the USA, which individual accumulated the most time? In other words, who served the longest? (Excluding FDR, I assume.) Thanks. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 07:01, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

There is no reason to exclude FDR. The top contenders are Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon. FDR was never vice-president but he was elected president four times. He died shortly after his fourth inauguration, serving 12 years and a little over a month. Nixon served two full terms as vice-president under Dwight Eisenhower, and was elected president twice. He resigned a bit over a year and a half into his second term, so he wins the prize with over 13-1/2 years in those roles. Third place goes to John Adams who served two full terms as vice-president under George Washinton followed by one full term of his own as president, for 12 years. Cullen328 (talk) 07:22, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Just tallied up the number of days every President and Vice President has served in office, a list that has 79 people. You're dead on about Nixon being first (4949 days) and FDR being second (4422 days.) However, while John Adams did indeed serve three full terms, he didn't start serving his first VP term until April 21, 1789 as opposed to the standard March 4, as noted in John Adams#Election. If we go purely by actual service time and not expected term time, this means that he served 4334 days, which would actually be fifth place. In third place would be George H. W. Bush, who served three full terms (twice VP, once president) for a total of 4383 days, and in fourth place would be Thomas Jefferson, who also served three full terms (once VP, twice president) but lost out by a day due to 1800 not being a leap year, for 4382 days total. The only other person to serve more than two terms worth is none other than Joe Biden, whose tally is at 4290 days and counting.

Other interesting notes from the tally:

1. The most common service lengths are 1461 days and 2922 days. 32 people have served the former, and 20 people have served the latter. Of course, this is just 4 years'/8 years' worth of days respectively, including the expected 1/2 leap day(s).
2. 6 people, as mentioned earlier, have served more than two terms' worth of days, 7 people served between one and two terms' worth of days, and 14 people served less than one term's worth of days (although this 14 also includes Kamala Harris, who will likely join the 1 termers, possibly more pending the upcoming election.)
3. Somehow, Thomas Jefferson is the only person whose position on the list was meaningfully affected by the leap year century rule. While John Adams also lost a day to the 1800 lack of leap day, his aforementioned late VP term start day more than offset that otherwise-minor difference. William McKinley's loss of a day in 1900 would have been meaningful if he hadn't been assassinated. Similarly, his first VP Garret Hobart died in office in 1899, and the next VP after him, none other than Teddy Roosevelt, started his term in 1901. Finally, 2000 was a leap year, so no chance for any strangeness there.
4. Even with vice presidents added, William Henry Harrison's 31-day presidential term is the shortest time served, although William R. King's 45-day VP term comes close.
5. Speaking of coming close, by pure coincidence, Henry Wilson's 993-day term as the 18th VP from March 4, 1873 to November 22, 1875 - a term which ended in death by stroke - was one day longer than Garret Hobart's 992-day term as the 24th VP from March 4, 1897 to November 21, 1899 - which ended also in death, except by heart disease.

GalacticShoe (talk) 15:12, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for your excellent research, GalacticShoe. Cullen328 (talk) 16:42, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks, all, for the insightful and thorough answers. Does Wikipedia have any type of (single) article about this type of scenario? (Without having to piece together info from separate articles.) Thanks. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 01:34, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Source location -- Mirabella September 1990, Peter Schjeldahl

Hi -- I was hoping to get some assistance in locating a source for an article I'm editing (Cady Noland). The piece I'm looking for is in the September 1990 edition of Mirabella (WorldCat link for magazine), pp 88-93: "Venice Anyone?" by Peter Schjeldahl. No libraries in my vicinity have a copy of that issue, bound or otherwise, but it's been referenced quite a few times in other literature about Noland, with some pretty great quotes/analysis that I'd love to see in total. Any idea where I might be able to find a full-text transcription or otherwise get access to this? Any assistance appreciated. Thanks! 19h00s (talk) 19:38, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Someone may be able to help you here, but posting at WP:REX is more likely to connect you with someone who can supply you with the article. Deor (talk) 13:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

That was gonna be my next question, wasn't sure if there was a better place to ask! Thanks for this :) 19h00s (talk) 14:32, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 20

Trotskyism: Adaptations.

Hello, I was wondering if there are any adaptations or variations of Trotskysism (or lenninism to an extent) that focuses more solely on economics or economic theory, maybe more specifically on distribution of resources. I think this might just be a certain branch of Communist economics, however I am not too well versed in economics so any helps is appreciated. NIght Palace (talk) 03:36, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Neither Trotskyist not Leninist, but left communist: Fundamental Principles of Communist Production and Distribution. This is an English translation of Grundprinzipien kommunistischer Produktion und Verteilung. Although originally published in German, in 1930, it was written by members of the Dutch council-communist Groep van Internationale Communisten, with Jan Appel as the main author.  --Lambiam 17:15, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

He seems to have had a lot in common with the later policies of Deng Xiaoping, particularly a mixed public/private economy. Trotsky appears to have sought to de-emphasize heavy industry in favor of more open trade as a means of accumulating foreign exchange. His electrification commission hearkens to infrastructure development, and he criticized Stalin for ignoring consumerism.

Our article also cites Stafford Beer’s Project Cybersyn in Chile as influenced by Trotsky. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 18:11, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Sesame Street season 55

At around this time last year there was official evidence that Sesame Street's 54th season was in development. But there's no evidence of any kind that season 55 is in development. Does this mean that the season is taking a while for some reason?? Please answer with your best knowledge. Georgia guy (talk) 15:38, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Have you looked for this on Google? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:11, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Gilt masks: cost today

How much gold is there in a mask of Tutankhamun, Psusennes, Amenemope? I'm wondering the material cost were in replica. Temerarius (talk) 17:56, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

The word "gilt" is a little ambiguous here. Gold leaf hammered thin isn't all that expensive, but solid gold is a different proposition. The so-called "Mask of Agamemnon" contains a significant amount of gold, but I don't know how the Egyptian masks were made (though I was probably close to one at a King Tut exhibition long ago)... AnonMoos (talk) 00:28, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

That's funny that comes up, they say the so-called is also called the "Mona Lisa of prehistory" (ugh,) where just above I quoted somebody calling a ducks painting the "Mona Lisa of Egypt," which is a high piece of praise for such an accomplished culture. Somebody should create Category:Mona Lisas of Places. Anyways, most mentions don't use the words "gilt" or "solid."

Temerarius (talk) 02:23, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Why would the replica replicate the amount of gold? Is this an exercise in experimental archeology? If the goal is to show the replica in a museum, they'd electro-plate it. Probably gold-plated nickel-plated copper. Who'd know?  Card Zero  (talk) 04:16, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

There may be symbolism involved in using actual gold rather than something that just looks like gold. There's a 21st-century replica of the Polish coronation crown that was melted down by the Prussians in 1811; not only does it contain real solid gold, but it's specifically gold obtained from Prussian coins that were minted in 1811. — Kpalion^(talk) 10:57, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Our Mask of Tutankhamun article says:

It is fashioned from two layers of high-karat gold, varying from 1.5–3 mm (0.059–0.118 in) in thickness, and weighing 10.23 kg (22.6 lb).[7] X-ray crystallography conducted in 2007 revealed that the mask is primarily made of copper-alloyed 23 karat gold to facilitate the cold working used to shape the mask. The surface of the mask is covered in a very thin layer (approximately 30 nanometres) of two different alloys of gold: a lighter 18.4 karat shade for the face and neck, and 22.5 karat gold for the rest of the mask.

Assuming that the average purity of the gold used is 22 carat, Google says the scrap value of the actual mask today would be about GBP 5,825 or USD 7,590. As others have pointed out, there would be no need to replicate the exact metal content in a replica intended for display. Alansplodge (talk) 12:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Alansplodge, perhaps you made an error in your Google query. Today's price for ten kilograms of gold is $875,180. Cullen328 (talk) 22:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

Syrian-Israeli history: what is happening in this scene of A Plate of Sardines?

I was watching Omar Amiralay's 1997 film A Plate of Sardines, a documentary about Quneitra. At the end of the film (viewable here; scene starts at 13:03), we see two Arab women communicating via megaphones over what seems to be a border between Syria and Israel. Can someone explain to me what is happening, if it's apparent? Is the Syrian woman speaking to friends or family who are citizens of Israel? In the Palestinian territories? Thanks! Zanahary 07:01, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

See United Nations Disengagement Observer Force and Golan Heights. DuncanHill (talk) 12:28, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Zanahary -- They're likely Druze (the woman on the Israel side living in Majdal Shams or another smaller Druze village on the Golan Heights). Almost all the Syrian inhabitants of that area who were not Druze fled in 1967. The Golan Druze are not Palestinians, and many of them might not consider themselves to have much in common with the inhabitants of the West Bank or Gaza. AnonMoos (talk) 12:47, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 8

Popularity of Greek

On 6 October 2024, the 'Top read' article was Greek language (Still visible on mobile app; I don't know if the list can be linked from here?) with 1.6M views. Given that the Greek language is neither a singer, a YouTube influencer, a US politician, or recently deceased, what caused this outburst of interest in it? -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 19:09, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

It wasn't actually Greek language, but Greek alphabet. Somebody reported the spike earlier today on Talk:Greek alphabet; nobody had a good explanation for it yet. The statistics can be seen here: https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&start=2015-07-01&end=2024-10-06&pages=Greek_alphabet. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:35, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Also, the stats page shows it was literally a single-day spike, jumping from around 10,000 per day to 1.6M on just one day (5 October), and then immediately back to normal the next day. I'd say that almost certainly excludes an explanation by a genuine sudden spike in human reader interest – I expect it must be some bot activity, software glitch or some such. Fut.Perf. ☼ 19:40, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

Ooops! My bad. Thanks for the correction. But that explains why there was no mention at Talk:Greek language. -- Verbarson  ^talk_edits 20:03, 8 October 2024 (UTC)

October 14

Knyttr knutr

Could someone please translate the following Old Norse as faithfully as possible into English (long story short: The first Knut in history was apparently called thusly because he was a foundling found with a knot - that much I found out when I wrote de:Knut (Vorname) some years ago. But apparently it isn't clear where this "knot" was knotted - like a bandana around his head, or was it a piece of cloth knotted in the woods?):

þat var lagt vndir uidar rætr ok knyttr knutr mykill j enninu a silkidregli er þat hafde vm hofudit. þar var j ỏrtugar gull. barnnit var uafit j guduefiar pelle. þeir taka upp barnit ok hafa hæim med ser ok koma sua hæim er konungr sat yfir drykkiubordum ok hirdin ok saka sig vm þat er þeir hofdu æigi gad at fylgia konungi heim. en konungr kuazst æigi firir þetta mundu ræidr uera. ok nu sogdu þeir konunginum huat georzst hafde j forum þeirra. en hann beiddizst at sia suæininn ok let ser færa ok læitzst uel a sueininn ok mællti. sueinn sia mun vera storra manna ok betri fundinn en æigi. ok let sidan vatnne ausa ok nafnn gefa ok kallade Knut."

Thanks, --2A02:3033:700:E174:D497:BFFF:FE06:1B53 (talk) 18:56, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

This is part of the Jómsvíkinga saga, written in the Old Icelandic dialect of Old Norse. Given how conservative Icelandic is, translating it as if it is modern Icelandic should usually give one a fairly good idea. For the first sentence, Google translate produces, "[The child] was laid on the back of the head and a knot was tied on the forehead with a silk rug that covered the head."  --Lambiam 07:48, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The full text and its translation can be found here: The Saga of the Jomsvikings, but apparently from a different manuscript since the wording differs somewhat. As regards the naming of Knútr, the editor has added a footnote (p. 2):

The saga-writer understood Knútr to mean 'knot' and so an explanation is given for its origin, as so often in the sagas. But the name Chnuz occurs among the Alemanni, (Bac A. Deutsche Namenkunde II 342, 350) and the ON word may be a loan word from OHG.

Alansplodge (talk) 08:38, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

What would the name mean, in that case? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:28, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

October 15

What my question is is is my question well phrased?

What I had had, had disappeared.

The second example is even better, because it doesn't need quotation marks (for any direct speech).

Two questions:

a) Bedises the consecutive identical words "had", are there other instances of three consecutive identical words (without quotation marks and without proper nouns), in a grammatically proper sentence, as far as the English language is concerned?

b) What about other languages (regardless of the analogous word for the English word "had" in those languages)?

HOTmag (talk) 04:08, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Your header question can be rendered more obviously grammatical with punctuation:

"What my question is, is 'is it a grammatically proper sentence?'"

Your second example likewise:

"What I had had, 'had "had" disappeared'".

In neither case are the quotation marks absolutely required, but they render the meanings much more obvious.

Regarding (a), there are doubtless other similar possibilities, and you are surely familiar with the famous "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"."? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 05:36, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you for the memorandum about the buffalo. But I need an instance of three consecutive identical words, without proper nouns and without quotation marks (i.e. adding them will make the sentence ungrammatical). HOTmag (talk) 06:30, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The buffalo* sentence contains three consecutive identical common words.  --Lambiam 08:04, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Yep. HOTmag (talk) 08:19, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Then there's James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:59, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Not only does your example remain in the same frame of "had" (while I asked for another frame), it also contains no "three consecutive identical words, without proper nouns and without quotation marks", hence it does not fulfill the requirement. HOTmag (talk) 08:16, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Yeah yeah yeah. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:49, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh, this is what I was looking for ! Thanx thanx thanx. HOTmag (talk) 12:55, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Really really really big

Great great great grandfather 115.188.72.131 (talk) 08:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

See: Eckler, A. Ross (1996). "A Soup Can Can Can-Can; Can You?". Word Ways. 29 (2): 89–95. Avessa (talk) 12:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I notice that those English examples heavily depend on three properties of the English language:

• In some cases, you can make a dependent clause without any form of conjunction or relative pronoun.
• You can make compounds by just putting words together, spaced, but without any linking sounds.
• Conjugation of verbs and declination of nouns is very limited.

In English, constituents may appear in relatively fixed order, but without clear markers giving the boundaries of such constituents, you can still make incomprehensible word soup. I consider parsing complex sentences in for example German easier, even when the main verb is several lines down from the subject. (My native language is Dutch.) PiusImpavidus (talk) 15:55, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Have you seen the list of linguistic example sentences? — Kpalion^(talk) 08:39, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Money money money.^[16][17][18]  --Lambiam 08:02, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Had had

The expression "had had", is exlusive in that it is (probably) the most common English expression composed of two consecutive words - with identical spellings but with different meanings (Past Simple and Past Participle of the verb "have").

It seems to be even more common than "twenty twenty" (in which: only the first "twenty" means two thousand), and also more common than any two consecutive identical words one of which is a proper noun or a word inside quotation marks, like: say "say", write "write", hear "hear", like "like", and likewise.

The same phenomenon is found in Frisian (which is pretty close to English): had had = hie hie.

Are there other languages sharing the same property, as far as the verb "have" is concerned? HOTmag (talk) 05:08, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

"Twenty twenty" is (was) a very common pronunciation for the year 2020, but is not very commonly written out in words in that form. AnonMoos (talk) 07:21, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Of course. HOTmag (talk) 07:44, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

The other Germanic languages, which would be the most likely guess, all seem to have different forms for the simple past and past participle (and some, like German and Dutch, also put the participle at the end of the sentence). Smurrayinchester 08:50, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Past participle is also found in languages other than the Germanic ones, for example: Romance langauges (e.g. French, Spanish), Celtic languages (e.g. Welsh, Cornic), Indo-Iranian languages (e.g. Sanskrit). HOTmag (talk) 09:14, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

French has the passé antérieur, a form of the pluperfect, with il eut eu. Whether you accept that depends on whether you want identical spelling or are satisfied with identical pronunciation. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:27, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes (also: eus eu, eût eu). HOTmag (talk) 17:43, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

In some AAVE English, you can have the duplicated words been been form a stressed remote past progressive tense (there are a bunch of variant aspects -- detailed in e.g. Stevanin 2004 pp. 41--42.) The first 'been'/'BIN' is a stressed marker and remote past aspect, and the second is the past progressive 'been'.

Presumably since 'done'/'DUN' can also be used as an auxiliary particle (ibid. pp. 42--43), one could similarly see the constructed aspect done done, but I haven't heard of it. SamuelRiv (talk) 16:27, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I assume then that you are not from the American South, as "done done" is pretty common. Example:

Person 1: "I'm going to mow the yard."

Person 2: "No need, I've done done it." --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:56, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

No I'm not. In that construction, is the initial "done" in that example being used in the stressed+remote aspect as "been" was described in the paper? (Sounds like it, but not sure.)

Also as an extra side note, most English usage (and most(?) other languages) has reduplication emphasis, as in these examples: "You good? Yeah, good-good."; "Do you like, as in like-like him?"; "I'm done. Done-done. Not a single thing left to do." The difference with the verb particle is (among other things) that it can be used in a full subject-verb-object sentence. SamuelRiv (talk) 22:49, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Not sure what you mean by the remote aspect. "I've done (ie "already") done it (ie "mowed the grass")."--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:57, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

"That that" is also fairly common. You can find it in Shakespeare and the KJV. --Amble (talk) 17:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Also: "(He gave) her her (book)". HOTmag (talk) 09:28, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

In Finnish, it is ei ollut ollut and eivät olleet olleet. And does English ever use passive forms of to be, such as "has been been", "had been been", "will have been been" and "would have been been"? --40bus (talk) 06:46, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

40bus -- English theoretically allows a "had been being X'ed" construction ("They had been being followed" or whatever), but it's usually rather awkward in practice, and it doesn't occur too frequently. Nothing with "been been" in standard English... AnonMoos (talk) 19:05, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Here's one example I can think of in Polish: Dostawca węgla miał miał na sprzedaż. "The coal supplier had (miał) coal dust (miał) for sale. — Kpalion^(talk) 08:34, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I remember an example from my school Latin classes: the accusative for "bad apple" is "malum malum". -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:47, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

They had slightly different pronunciations in ancient Latin, since the "a" vowels of the two words differed in length. AnonMoos (talk) 19:07, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I remember one of them was spelled with an ā to denote a different pronunciation. That's in my textbook. But I doubt the Latins would have done that. To them, the words were exact homographs. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:40, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

In French there's the construction avoir à, whose conjugation produces a homophonous and almost homographic sequence a à, as in il a à travailler "he has to work". --Theurgist (talk) 21:24, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

October 16

Language link for Ludmila Chistovich

Could someone make the Ukrainian page uk:Чистович Людмила Андріївна into a language link to page Ludmilla Chistovich.

Also Wikidata has two different records for this person (one English, one Ukrainian). They should be merged. 178.51.16.158 (talk) 17:18, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Done. — Kpalion^(talk) 08:07, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

English spelling and numbers

1. Are there any spelling differences where Canadian and Australian English universally use American spelling?
2. Are there any words where ⟨sce⟩ and ⟨sci⟩ are pronounced as /ske/ and /ski/?
3. Does English use "one and half" to refer to 1.5, or 1 1⁄2? Such as "one and half" hours for 90 minutes, "one and half years" for 18 months, or "one and half days" for 36 hours? --40bus (talk) 06:38, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

As for #3, those three expressions are synonyms. Cullen328 (talk) 06:42, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

For me it has to be "one and a half", not "one and half". Double sharp (talk) 07:01, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree. Cullen328 (talk) 07:05, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

As a BrE speaker, I would more often say "an hour and a half" (etc.) for units of time. If making several measurement of dimensions, "one and a half inches" (etc.) would be routine, but I might still prefer "an inch and a half" if mentioning a single measurement. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 09:01, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Re #2: TIL from Merriam-Webster that scedasticity and derivatives are apparently not supposed to be pronounced with /sk/ as I always thought, even though it's borrowed from Ancient Greek σκεδαστικός which has a kappa there. Nonetheless the pronunciation with /k/ still seems common (two examples), so I still feel free to give that as an example for ⟨sce⟩. Double sharp (talk) 08:52, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Skedastic is an alternative spelling of scedastic, so naturally the latter would have an alternative pronunciation.  --Lambiam 13:53, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Old Science Fiction fans like myself (bear with me, this gets relevant eventually) like to abbreviate it as "SF" (i.e. "Ess-eff"). Decades ago, the sf fan and humorist Forrest J Ackerman coined the term "Sci-fi" ("Sigh-fie") as a pun on Hi-fi (High fidelity), which was quickly taken up by jounalists and others not part of the SF community (it became a shibboleth we used to spot lurking journalists at SF Conventions), but was applied by those within it specifically to badly written TV and Film works that used superficial science-fictional trimmings but lacked any attempts at scientific plausibility. Years later, some in the SF community started to pronounce Sci-fi as "Skiffy" when talking about SF in an ironic and/or self-deprecating manner. A somewhat niche example of 40bus's #2. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 09:17, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Sceptic. Burzuchius (talk) 09:56, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

The spelling sceptic is the British spelling; the American spelling is skeptic. The medical term scepsis is pronounced /ˈskɛpsɪs/ on both sides of the pond.  --Lambiam 10:01, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

And its derivatives, such as omphaloscepsis, contemplation of one's navel. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:02, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

In Britain, we use the spelling "programme" except for computing, where the US spelling, "program" is preferred. Alansplodge (talk) 12:18, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

1. I'd say that "program" is pretty standard in the parts of Canada in which I've resided. However, we still mostly use "ou" rather than "o" (e.g. honour). Clarityfiend (talk) 02:15, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

2. ASCII. --Amble (talk) 21:04, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

2. Scelp and sceuophylax, both very obscure and dubious.  Card Zero  (talk) 08:01, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

1. A programme is what you buy to find out more about the performance you're seeing at a theatre. Everything else is a program.

2. SCEGGS? Shirt58 (talk) 🦘 02:14, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

At the Al Smith Memorial Dinner 2024: what are "hoyers"?

When introducing Jim Gaffigan at the Al Smith Memorial Dinner (beginning of the video) Mary Callahan Erdoes says of her and Jim: "We're both Irish Catholic, we're both from Chicago, we're both hoyers." The word "hoyers" (?) seems to be recognized by the audience: but what are "hoyers"? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 14:40, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

What she said was "Hoyas"—i.e., both attended Georgetown University. See Georgetown Hoyas. Deor (talk) 14:52, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

See Hoya Saxa. DuncanHill (talk) 14:59, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Desolate Case (?)

Hello! So, I have a doubt about something called the ‘desolate case’. As per what I know (from ChatGPT and my linguist friends) this case is either used in languages like Abkhaz, or is a hypothetical case. ChatGPT told me that it indicates that a noun is in a state of abandonment, desolation, chaos, anarchy, physical/emotional emptiness, loneliness and other things. My linguist friends said that it could be hypothetical, or used in conlangs. When I asked GeminiAI, it said that it is used in Udi and Abkhaz. I added this case to ‘List of Grammatical Cases’ but User Danyunsik told me about it. I hope you can clarify this doubt. Thank you! Long-live-ALOPUS (talk) 15:34, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

A grammatical case indicates that a constituent noun phrase is used in one of a restricted set of grammatical functions. For example, in the Turkish sentence avcıyı öldürdü domuz we see the noun phrases avcıyı ("hunter") and domuz ("swine") separated by the verb form öldürdü ("killed"). Translated word by word, we'd get "the hunter killed the swine". But the suffix -yı tells us that the first word is in the accusative case, meaning it is the object of the sentence, so the actual meaning is that the swine killed the poor hunter. If it had been the other way, it could be reported as avcı domuzu öldürdü. The same case-based grammatical analysis holds for the Latin sentence venatorem occidit sus.

Indicating the state something is in is not a grammatical function. In many languages the state of something being sweet and cute is indicated by a hypocoristic suffix, like Turkish -cik. To this suffix, case endings can be added to indicate the grammatical function of a noun phrase, like avcı domuzcuğu öldürdü: "the hunter killed the little swine". The word order could also be domuzcuğu öldürdü avcı; the case endings reveal the roles of the actors in this drama.

Just for this reason alone – being desolate is not a grammatical function – it appears that the curious case of the desolate case is a made-up story.  --Lambiam 18:20, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Thanks so much! Long-live-ALOPUS (talk) 01:43, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

I knew about cases. My only doubt was if this case exists or not. But anyways, it does seem like a good idea for a case in a conlang! Long-live-ALOPUS (talk) 01:46, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

October 10

Special name

Is there a special name for chords that have the same notes but a different root?? Examples are C6 and Am7; Csus4 and Fsus2. Georgia guy (talk) 00:42, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

This is something similar to the concept of Relative key. There's Common chord (music).  Card Zero  (talk) 05:37, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

C⁶ is the first inversion of Am⁷. See further Inversion (music) § Root position and inverted chords.  --Lambiam 05:48, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Oh yes, I suppose that is the term. I passed that by, thinking "no, an inverted chord is still the same chord in a different order, I need to find a name for when these function as different chords".  Card Zero  (talk) 06:02, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

A Killer's Memory

I've just watched a film on TV, with the above title. On here, it's obviously the film Knox Goes Away. Google correctly finds this article when you search for A Killer's Memory, but I can't find any clear indication of a connection between the two titles. Can anyone tell me whiether it was known by different titles in different markets? Rojomoke (talk) 15:54, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

By the way, this is not the Belgian film The Memory of a Killer, although the subject matter is similar. Rojomoke (talk) 15:59, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

German WP calls it "A Killer's Memory". Various google results suggest the name was changed for its Prime Video release. Our article needs updating. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 18:32, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

In its AKA section, imdb has "A Killer's Memory" solely as the title in Germany.  --Lambiam 20:36, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Heartwarming, funny, adventure and family Disney movies/tv shows

Are all Disney movies/tv shows heartwarming, funny and adventurous? And are they all aimed at entire families? 86.130.9.101 (talk) 21:21, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

It depends on your definitions. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:32, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Yes, what is a Disney show? Devs (TV series), for instance, was a dark sci-fi drama about free will. It was unheartwarming, not funny, and not really an adventure story, and wasn't aimed at entire families probably, but it was produced by FXP and DNA TV, both owned by Disney.  Card Zero  (talk) 06:17, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

And a number of Disney's early cartoons had plenty of violence and killing in them. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:59, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

Definitely not. Read The Walt Disney Company. Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:16, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

October 13

Midnight Oil lyrics

Midnight Oil is a politically-focused rock band from Australia. In 1984, they released a song called Who Can Stand in the Way, which is broadly about the brutality of capitalism. The lyrics, as usual, are rooted in Australia and Australian culture: John Laws, Dobroyd Point, First Fleet, etc. But the part I'm curious about is a kind of lyrical epilogue at the very end, where Garrett sings:

When the spinifex hit Sydney, it was the last thing we expected
When the desert reached the Gladesville, we tried to tame it
And when the emus grazed at the Pyrmont, it suddenly dawned on us all
Hah, everybody, the world was silent and the door was shut.

These also reference Australian things, but it's otherwise completely out of place and sounds kind of like they're quoting someone. Our article on John Laws says that he published poetry and he's name-checked right at the start of the song. Is this passage from him? Googling has not turned up anything for me yet. Matt Deres (talk) 14:47, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Why do you assume it's a quote? To me it just feels like part of the lyrics of the song. --Viennese Waltz 03:35, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

If it were published poetry, then phrases from it would surely appear on Google, which (apart from quotes from these lyrics) it doesn't. Alansplodge (talk) 12:02, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Well, fair enough. But if I search for John Laws poetry, I get reviews, and other people recording it, and other evidence of their existence, but precious little actual poetry. Likewise, Googling, john laws lyrics only gives examples of songs about someone named John Laws (same guy or not). Matt Deres (talk) 18:52, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Given that Laws is still alive, copyright concerns are likely to restrict the amount of his poetry uploaded and searchable. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 05:20, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

I think it might come from elsewhere because it's sung in a different style, and doesn't match the theme or pace of the rest of the song. To be honest, it doesn't sound like any of the Oils music I've heard. Matt Deres (talk) 18:41, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

You missed a movie

In the Monty Python list of films on their page you missed listing the film, Jabberwocky (1977) Though it wasn't written by most of the Python troupe (Terry Gilliam was co-writer with Lewis Carroll and Charles Alverson), two of the Pythoners were in the movie: Michael Palin and Terry Jones. I feel it should be mentioned in the article as a peripheral piece they had a hand in. Frankly, I thought it was a terrible movie, but I still think we need to mention their failures as well as their successes. According to IMDB it still got a 6.1 even though it wasn't a box office smash. Here is the IMDB link if you want to use it as a source. Jabberwocky (1977) - IMDb https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076221/ 72.35.124.250 (talk) 23:04, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Wikipedia articles exist because volunteer Wikipedia editors choose to create them, not because of any "corporate" editorial decisions on what article should exist. As you seem to be new here, I probably wouldn't recommend that you leap straight into creating that article, but hang around, learn the ropes, and may you can do so. HiLo48 (talk) 23:23, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Jabberwocky is a Terry Gilliam film, not a Monty Python film. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 23:38, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

That would be ... something completely different. Clarityfiend (talk) 02:09, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

We do, of course, already have an article about the film: Jabberwocky (film). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.1905} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:50, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

If it were necessary to list every "peripheral piece they had a hand in", we would have to list every Terry Gilliam film (obviously) as well as many others like A Fish Called Wanda and Shrek. While they are known for Money Python, they are actors, writers, directors, and even some film producing. After 40 years, they've worked on a lot of movies and many of those projects involve more than one member of the group. It appears that the only two who aren't on speaking terms are Eric Idle and John Cleese. The others appear eager to work together when they can. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 13:02, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Well... I presume none of them are on speaking terms with Graham Chapman anymore. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:16, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Terry Jones might be. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:03, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

I had a similar issue when writing Les Six#Collaborations. You may or may not like my approach. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:59, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 19

English Horn and (concert pitch) low D

According to Cor anglais (edit contributed by Jerome Kohl and sourced to Norman Del Mar Anatomy of the Orchestra pp.158-159) Antonín Dvořák's Scherzo capriccioso uses a low D on the instrument (whose lowest note normally is a low E) and yet (according to the article and presumably Norman Del Mar's book) an extension down to that note is unlikely to have ever been manufactured? Could someone explain? How is that note then produced? If you have access to Norman Del Mar's book, does he say anything? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 20:22, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

In a part score at Free-scores.com for the Corno inglese, we see in bars 90 & 92 a D₃ (notated A₃), but in an orchestral score at Free-scores.com the Cor.ingl. plays a D₄ in these bars (notated A₄). So I guess one solution is that the player plays these notes an octave up.  --Lambiam 09:10, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Prior to an informed answer (which I hope we get), I can offer a number of mostly unserious conjectures.

(1) Dvořák, not a woodwind player, didn't know (or forgot) that the note was below the instrument's range.

(2) He knew, and intended it as a joke. Perhaps he was pranking the player(s) in the particular Prague orchestra the piece was written for.

(3) He knew, but didn't care – the music demanded that note and it was up to the players and instrument makers to achieve it.

(4) He knew the particular orchestra had an unusual variant of the instrument (part of the oboe family, perhaps a forerunner of the Bass oboe) that could play the note.

(5) He had intended that the part be played on a bassoon, but forgot to indicate this in the score.

(6) It was a simple transcription error, which he was not immune to – see Antonín Dvořák#String quartets.

Have fun shooting these down. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:45, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

This is a different, but also a very interesting question. Maybe the answer is something close to (3): that's what he heard, and even though he knew it couldn't be done, that's still what he heard that English horn doing. As to the practical solution, my guess would be that what people do is what Lambiam suggested. I even think in the part score that Lambiam mentions, in some places, someone wrote by hand a high A above the printed low A in the score. But there are several recordings of the piece on YouTube, so if you or anyone hears well and likes that piece or are curious about it, they could give it a listen and report back here what they've heard. Does anyone know of other such "ideal" unplayable notes in the standard literature? (Ignoring modern works that call for notes in the range of what's only audible to bats, where the note itself is a prank, the impossibility being the very purpose, meant to demonstrate something, although I'm never sure what.) 178.51.16.158 (talk) 11:21, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

There is a story about one famous composer (who, I've forgotten) showing another musician a piano score he'd just written, which at one point had left and right hands busy respectively low and high on the keyboard while a single note was sounded around its middle. When his visitor protested that this was impossible to play, the composer commenced the piece, and at the crucial moment leant forward and struck the crucial key with his nose.

By the way, I should have included with my earlier suggestions: (7) It was an error by the score's publisher. As a former professional book editor, I am well aware that printed works are rarely completely error-free, and I'm sure this applies to printed music as well as to texts. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 12:36, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 20

Unaccompanied solo voice in Western classical music 1600-1900?

Has anyone heard of a work (a real work, not a vocalise for singers) for unaccompanied solo voice in Western classical music from between about 1600 to about 1900? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 19:05, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

Googling "unaccompanied solo voice" produced a stack of results, including these likely candidates for further research: [19], [20], [21], [22]. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 20:59, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure that except for songs outside the common practice period (plain chant, Hildegard von Bingen, Adam de la Halle, trouvères, troubadours, etc.) or folk melodies (not classical art music) those Google results are not real. Not your fault of course and I appreciate your trying to help. I did not check every single one but the first one in the first link is already spurious: Ghizzolo "Bella Ninfa fugitiva" is for at least 2 voices. On IMSLP when I searched for works for "1 voice" I got a bunch of results. Most seem to be some kind of folklore or other but I noticed a Debussy work whose score has only a single vocal part: Berceuse pour "La Tragédie de la mort"[23]. "La Tragédie de la mort" is incidental music for a play of that name and apparently that berceuse is indeed for an unaccompanied solo voice. It's probably sung by an actor, not a singer. It's from 1899. The extreme limit, almost. Something meant to sound like a folk melody. Would this be considered "Western classical music" though? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 01:22, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Everything Debussy wrote is in that category. The concept of crossover music did not emerge till the 20th century; until then, if a composer was working in the Western classical music tradition (WCMT), then everything they wrote would also belong there. Now, Debussy was influenced by the gamelan music of Indonesia, and wrote at least one piece ("Pagodes") that emulated the sound and structure of the gamelan, but that piece is still considered part of the WCMT. These other people were similarly influenced. Mozart ("Rondo alla turca") and even earlier composers were influenced by Orientalism, but they weren't departing from the WCMT by doing so.

On the other hand, George Gershwin made his name by writing popular songs and musicals, then he dipped his toe into the waters of WCMT by writing a rhapsody for piano and orchestra (Rhapsody in Blue), a set of variations for piano and orchestra (albeit based on a popular song, "I've Got Rhythm"), an overture (Cuban Overture), a piano concerto, and a symphonic poem (An American in Paris). Despite their obvious thematic and rhythmic borrowings from the popular and jazz worlds, their form belonged to the WCMT.

For a long time, people like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, Bernard Herrmann, and even John Williams were looked down upon by the cognoscenti because they wrote vulgar, worthless film music, not fit to be considered worthy of the WCMT. Well, they've latterly come in to their own and achieved the recognition and respect they're due, and their scores are regularly played and recorded by symphony orchestras around the world. They're popular, in the sense that they're liked by people who wouldn't normally attend classical concerts or listen to classical music radio, but they also belong to the WCMT. That's also true of Strauss waltzes. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:35, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 21

Super Bowl and American television

How did the Super Bowl come to be such a huge phenomenon? It's repeatedly been the most viewed thing on American television year after year, with businesses paying extreme amounts to get ad spots during the event. When did this trend begin, and why? Lizardcreator (talk) 04:18, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

Even before the name "Super Bowl" was adopted, it was very popular. The main reason is that American football was developed to appeal to television networks. Overall, the game hasn't changed significantly. Minor changes are made to appeal to television broadcasts such as having one team wear white and another team wear a color. Then, even on old tiny, grainy, black and white televisions, you could see the players on the field. The field is dark green with bright white stripes so you can see them. The ball is large enough to be seen. There are reserved camera locations all around the field that has increased to include cameras that fly over the field and cameras in the pylons. Much of that is to make the viewing experience better. Some of it is based on psychological testing. They could show the width of the field on the screen and you could see the pass from throw to catch. They don't. They zoom in on the quarterback. He throws the pass. You can't see where it is going. Oh my! What will happen!?!? It pans and you see the receiver. That moment of panning makes it more exciting to the viewer. Beyond the viewership, the NFL has customized the game to please television stations. There are plenty of commercial breaks. If you see a game in person, you will see that it stops often while it waits for the broadcast to come back from commercials. In the end, viewers are excited to see the games and television stations are eager to broadcast the games. Since Super Bowl I (which was not called a Super Bowl), it was an extremely popular televised event. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 18:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

It wasn't all that popular at first. The first two years were simply the AFL-NFL championship, in which the Packers owned their AFL opponents, and there were lots of empty seats in the stadiums. After the merger, the event became a lot more hyped-up. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:10, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

Name of a special effect

Now that image processing is so often digital, there is a special effect that I often see in TV commercials and occasionally in instant replays in sports. The effect takes a part of the image representing either an object or person, or some onscreen text, and emphasizes it by briefly making it larger. Rather than selecting a whole rectangle from the image and enlarging everything inside it, the effect I'm talking about modifies only the selected object or characters, leaving the background unchanged.

What I'm curious about is the name of this effect. --142.112.141.16 (talk) 07:20, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 10

Kathy Andrade

Was the Kathy Andrade who was a friend of the victim Murder of Reyna Marroquín the same woman as Kathy Andrade, the Salvadoran-American union activist? I can't find any reliable sources. TSventon (talk) 20:33, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

Andrade was on Forensic Files in 2000, described as a union activist and a friend of Marroquin. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 01:16, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

This is the Forensic Files episode with Kathy Andrade in it. She appears about 15 minutes into it. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 16:48, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

Thank you, it looks like the same woman, does the programme describe her as a union activist? TSventon (talk) 17:15, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

I notice that "The uploader has not made this video available in [my] country [the UK]": are you in the same position? {The poster formerly known nas 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 19:59, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

There is also a copy on Dailymotion. TSventon (talk) 20:32, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

The Forensic Files episode "A Voice from Beyond" only identifies Kathy Andrade as a friend of Marroquín, but all details fit. The episode reveals that Marroquin took lessons at the High School of Fashion Industries and attended Andrade's English class. Andrade is shown, talking about her frjend Angélica Marroquín, saying, "her dream was to become an American citizen". Our article on Kathy Andrade states that she was Education Director for Local 23-25 of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and organized various educational programs for union members, supporting their paths to citizenship. Also, we see a page of Marroquín's address book with Andrade's address, "311 W 24 ST", which is in the Penn South housing development where our article on Andrade states that she lived. While this is very strong but circumstantial evidence, the person seen speaking in this episode is clearly the same as shown in a photograph in Andrade's obit in The New York Yimes, captioned, "Kathy Andrade at a rally in Manhattan in 2006 on behalf of immigrants' rights".^[24] Kathy Andrade's biography at IMDb – not a "reliable source" – also makes the identification: "Was a leading union activist for garment workers in New York City for over 50 years. Assisting many Latin American workers, she became friends with a fellow Salvadoran worker by the name of Reyna Marroquin."^[25]  --Lambiam 07:45, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

@Lambiam: thank you for the detailed reply. I found "Kathy Andrade" on a list of orphaned articles and added a wikilink to the existing mention at "Murder of Reyna Marroquín" after a brief investigation. I had checked the IMDB, but know that is user generated. I think your answer is sufficient to convince me that the link was correct. It would be nice to have an online news source which joins the dots but not vital. I calculated that the 30 days after I added the link got 27 times as many views as the 30 days before, which shows how popular murder is on the internet. TSventon (talk) 16:52, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

October 13

Slowing down time

What are some ways I can slow down time (or relax) without using drugs or marijuana (since I hope to God I don't try any)? TWOrantula^TM (enter the web) 02:45, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Unfortunately I don't have a copy near me right now to check the details, but memory tells me that a character in Catch-22 by Joseph Heller chose to deliberately watch and involve himself in boring activities so that it would feel like he was living longer in a time and place where dying was highly likely. I welcome clarification from those with better memories or an actual copy of the book. HiLo48 (talk) 03:08, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

If Tom Lehrer's inference is to be believed, you could try listening to Das Lied von der Erde on repeat. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:28, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Meditation.^[26][27] Some recommend mindfulness,^[28][29] which can be seen as a specific meditation technique.^[30]  --Lambiam 08:14, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

For various reasons, I have lately been sleeping in two bouts of about 4 hours in 24, rather than one of about 8. A side effect I have noticed is that time seems to pass more slowly, perhaps because almost every time I wake up it's still the same day. This does of course require one not to need to interact with others on a more normal schedule very much. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 09:32, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

I tend to find that waiting at a bus stop achieves this very well. Shantavira|^{feed me} 18:57, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

Depending on your phobic predipositions you may take a few moments following the second hand of the stopwatch. Alternatively or not, do it while listening to some recorded works after Franz Tunder. Without a stopwatch it will require enough free space for pacing back and forth for a few steps. --Askedonty (talk) 19:00, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

There's always the proverbial "watching grass grow" or "watching paint dry". Or, you could get one of your namesakes to keep as a pet in a terrarium, and watch it all day, because they just sit there doing nothing most of the time. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:52, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

Occasionally wildly dancing a tarantella when nobody's watching. Clarityfiend (talk) 00:33, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

In the 1950s, Clint Eastwood thwarted that frenetic dance in Napalm Springs. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:28, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

October 14

Questions on environmental sustainability and whitewashing definition

Electric toothbrush#Environmental concerns

In this article what do they mean by "A plastic manual replaceable head toothbrush was probably the best, according to the study."

2020s in fashion#Barbiecore, McBling, and gyaru

And in this article what do they mean by "whitewashing" in this context? 58.104.108.223 (talk) 05:23, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

That term does not appear in the cited sources, but might have to do with white Barbie-doll types being the fashion standard. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:44, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

As to the first question, they meant a toothbrush that was fashioned from plastic (and not from bamboo), with the brushing action effected manually, by the user by moving their hand (and not with an electric motor), and with a head that was not fixed, but could be replaced on the toothbrush's handle when it was worn out, instead of the user discarding the whole assembly, not only the head but also the handle.  --Lambiam 09:54, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I found the following in source 354 (https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-y2k-style-trend-isnt-fatphobic-our-attitudes-about-it-are): Ads and runways showcasing the trends also sent another message. In an article called The Fatphobic & Racist Origins of Y2K Fashion Trends, Aishwarya Jagani cites Sabrina Strings in Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia, in which she explains how “Y2K fashion’s emphasis on thinness…erased the creative contributions of the Black community, attributing styles popularized by people of color to the white celebrities of the time.” The popular image of the day was of thin, white women, further limiting what society saw as beautiful.

I believe this is what is being referred to as "whitewashing". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 11:16, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

I don't see the "thorough" criticism (or any criticism) of McBling, though.  --Lambiam 16:08, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

October 16

Container islands in New York East River

I don't know what words to use to get a good search for this topic. If you look at satellite images of the East River in New York, you will see multiple rectangular "islands" that look like shipping containers stacked up. The images are very low quality, so it is possible the appearance is just artifacts of image compression. Are there actually stacks of shipping containers or something of similar appearance in the East River? If so, what are they? I originally dismissed it as the satellite picking up container ships moving along the river, but many of them are in the exact same place across more than one satellite image. So, they must be stationary. An example of one is off shore from the Rose M Singer Center on Riker's Island. On Google, it looks like a stack of containers. On Bing, it lookse like a rectangular building. Neither one labels it. Another one is halfway between Soundview pier and Ferry Point Park pier. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 14:28, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

A mystery! To me on the satellite photos they look like they could be barges either filled with loose material or covered in a light coloured tarp. To get a different angle, I looked for some near Google Street View coverage. There are a couple of mystery objects just east of the Bronx end of the Whitestone Bridge, and Street View coverage looking out over the East River at the south end of Robinson Avenue in Throg's Neck. Looking south on Street View, you can see what look very much like barges around the same location as the objects in the satellite photos.

As for what they're doing... Is the East River dredged regularly? That might explain them being there frequently/with long linger times, but also moving around - as a barge is filled up it moves off to deposit the fill elsewhere. 91.194.221.225 (talk) 14:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Lokking on Bing Maps, [31] the object off Rikers Island looks like a lighter with six or seven piles of material (maybe sand or gravel) onboard. There is a much smaller circular object close by, probably a bouy. Alansplodge (talk) 16:36, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Maybe those are anchor spots for barges when not in use. That would explain why they are in the same location, but appearing rather different, from two obviously different satellite passes. I didn't try a street view of the first one because I assumed there is no street view on Riker's Island. It turns out there is a "street view" from a sailboat, but the sail blocks view of the object. However, following that sailboat's path, I did see that the object between the piers is clearly a flat, red-sided barge full of containers. It is too flat to be a container ship (assuming that refers to those massive ships with hundreds of containers). Assuming these examples (and the many others I found) are anchor spots, I can start googling for official anchor spots along the East River. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 18:51, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

A guide once pointed me at such buoys during a school excursion to the port of Rotterdam, floating in the Waalhaven. You can view them there too. They're meant to tie vessels to, to moor away from the dockside. This can be to store empty barges, to use barges as floating storage or to transship directly from one ship to another, using floating or on-board loading facilities. Traditionally, cereals are transshipped that way. A giant floating vacuum cleaner comes alongside the ocean going ship, sucks up the cereals and dumps them in a river barge for transport deeper inland. If you scroll a bit in time on Google, you can find some ships transshipping bulk goods in the Waalhaven.

There's a lot of sand extraction along the Maas and Waal rivers, where I used to live. It's collected by dredging and sometimes dumped directly into a ship. It looks quite different from the piles you see in the barges near New York. The dredged material is pumped into the cargo hold as a very wet slurry. The sand sinks to the bottom of the hold; the water flows out. There're no visible piles. The material in the pictures was dry when loaded and must have been loaded by chute or conveyor belt.

If the material in the hold isn't sensitive to weather, the cover of river barges is often left off. This saves time. The cover consists of segments of sheet metal, optionally painted, that can be moved using a small portal crane. Sometimes the segments have wheels running on tracks, so that one segment of the cover can be rolled over another. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:54, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

With all the information here, I've found plenty of documentation for anchorage regulations throughout the rivers around New York and the locations where there seem to be barges are in fact official anchorages. They are not digital encoding artifacts in the satellite images. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 18:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

New York (as well as other cities) used to accumulate its garbage on barges, prior to its being disposed of in landfill sites or elsewhere/otherwise; finding places to do so became problematical – see for example Mobro 4000. Such procedures may still be in operation to some extent, and such barges can remain moored in place for long periods: I have seen similar barges remain for weeks at a time in Southampton harbour, beside which I used to work (there is a large refuse incineration plant on the Western shore of the harbour). Storing refuse thusly is relatively cheap, and keeps it from causing onshore problems with vermin, smells, fires, etc. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 23:25, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Road signs in China

Do road signs in China also inculde place names in pinyin? At least some signs in urban areas do that, but how widespread is this? Do they use toneless pinyin as English names? --40bus (talk) 15:43, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

It depends entirely on the area. Hong Kong has a lot of English signs due to the history of English rule and many English speakers still residing there. Beijing is an international city, as with any capital city. It has not only English, but other languages depending on the area of the city and who will likely be using the signs. Shainghai is a big business city with a lot of foreign residents and tourists. They adopted English and Pinyin as the alternative language for most signs. There is always an argument to remove English and Pinyin from the signs, but it doesn't progress much. If you travel away from locations with a lot of foreign residents and tourists, the chance of finding a sign in English or Pinyin drops. If you get near country borders, you will find signs with the other country's language along with Chinese for the same reason that English is found on signs where many people are expected to know English to some degree but not Chinese. 64.53.18.252 (talk) 21:20, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

In the top 20-50 cities destination signs are in characters and pinyin. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 23:44, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

While falling asleep, I thought that this is closely related to another topic. Many languages use similar words, so it is not necessary to translate. For example, police in English is police in French, Polizia in Italian, policía in Spanish, politi in Norweegian, poliţie in Romanian, pûlis in Kurdish... etc... Because the word is so similar across languages, there is no need to translate it. When it is different, as in Russian, you will often see it translated from полиция to politsiya. But, in Chinese, there is no way that a person who does not read Chinese to mentally shuffle the phonetics of 警察 to jǐngchá to Police. There is a need to translate words to a language that most visitors will recognize enough to understand. As English has borrowed so heavily from everyone else, it is a good choice for a catch-all/sounds-alike language. My personal experience is that most countries do not translate much. Instead, they use signage that doesn't require translation. I was easily able to get by in Spain, Italy, Turkey, India, Brazil, and Panama without having any knowledge of the local language. In Norway, I was amazed that their written language is so much like English that I thought they were translating. They simply pronounce the words different. 68.187.174.155 (talk) 14:54, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

October 17

Some vehicle-related questions

In recent months, I have become interested in personal watercraft and other recreational vehicles. I’ve been doing a lot of reading about these things and I’ve found one or two areas which confuse me. I am aiming to get these matters clarified in order to ensure I have the right information necessary to make an informed decision about acquiring for myself something of this sort. I would appreciate it if you could take a look at look at these things for me.

The first point of confusion for me would appear to be pricing. My understanding of this is rather poor, and I’m making a lot of assumptions based on the prices of cars and motorcycles. What I am confused by is how high the price tags are for things such as 2-seater aeroplanes and rigid inflatable boats. The planes seem on the surface to be not that much heavier or more powerful than an average motor car, yet they have six digit prices. The boats seem to be as expensive as a family car despite being considerably lighter and less mechanically complex. Why are the prices so high, and why isn’t anyone offering these types of vehicle at a lower price? What is it about the planes that stops them from being made as cheap as a 1.5 tonne automobile? And, what is it about the RIBs that makes them have 5 digit prices despite being made of rubber and not metal?

The other thing that I’m not quite sure about is the fact that battery electric technology still hasn’t completely taken over yet as far as recreational vehicles are concerned. In particular, even in light of climate change and respiratory concerns, gasoline powered go-karts and boats are still quite common. While I understand that price and battery size are important issues at the moment, I still would have thought that the technology would be a no-brainer for such small vehicles. Why would anyone risk damaging their lungs by using a petrol go-kart on an indoor tracks? Wouldn’t that be as bad as smoking? And, why haven’t batteries completely replaced fossil fuels for vehicles, such as small boats, jet skis, motorcycles, quad bikes, and snowmobiles? Why do people still support climate-destroying engines when battery-electric alternatives are possible with today’s technology? This is especially strange, when it would be easy to do battery swaps to deal with charging times.

I hope I can have some light shed on these mysteries. Then, I can make a more informed choice and be less confused. Thank you. Pablothepenguin (talk) 21:12, 17 October 2024 (UTC)

Price: There are several major factors in the cost of producing a factory-made vehicle (or any other manufactured item).

One is the cost of designing it, including the (often considerable) costs of demonstrating to the relevant regulating bodies that it will be (and continues to be) safe. This is a fixed cost, the same if you then go on to make one hundred or one million of the vehicle.

A second is the cost of making the factory that will make the vehicle. This is also largely fixed.

A third is the labour costs of paying the people who make the vehicle, manage the factory, etc. This generally increases with time (because wages usually increase), and obviously has a lower bound.

A fourth is the cost of the materials and components. This is variable, because the more you make the bigger discount you will be able to negotiate on bulk purchase, but it has a lower bound.

(There are other costs, such as marketing, after-sales service and spares manufacture, etc., but let's ignore those for the moment.)

The first two costs have to be recovered by spreading them over the price of all the vehicles sold, over and above the third and fourth which are inherent in producing each vehicle. This means that the more vehicles that are sold, the less that each individual vehicle's price will have to cover those upfront costs (which may have been paid for by investment or borrowing, which generate dividend or interest costs that also have to be covered).

'Average motor cars' are typically made (often in already-established factories that can easily switch to new designs) and sold in hundreds of thousands per model, so the first two costs are spread very thinly.

Vehicles such as recreational aeroplanes and boats are sold in much smaller numbers, so the upfront costs to be recovered are much higher per individual vehicle.

This is a very crude and non-comprehensive outline, based on my experience of working in both retail and manufacturing environments. No doubt an expert can give a far better one. I have some thoughts on battery power, but I'll leave that for others. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 03:45, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Today's popular consumer cars are manufactured in assembly lines in a continuous process using highly automated processes. At the rate in which they are produced, the automation results in considerable savings on the production costs. The rate of production of 2-seater aeroplanes or rigid inflatable boats of any brand is far lower, not justifying a comparable investment in automation.  --Lambiam 05:27, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Another factor is that aircraft manufacture and component parts are subject to a far stricter regime of quality control. [32] Alansplodge (talk) 09:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Does anyone know why 60 year old Cessna aeroplanes are still super expensive. Surely oldness = cheapness, right? Pablothepenguin (talk) 11:36, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Also, can anyone explain why a rubber boat comes in at a five figure price? Why can’t such things be cheaper than metal vehicles? Pablothepenguin (talk) 11:39, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I note that a Rigid inflatable boat is not inflatable except for the sides. I too am somewhat puzzled by the steep price. Leaving material costs out of it, there are some mysterious market forces at work. Old leisure boats, typically small cabin cruisers, are frequently abandoned and left to rot, yet those offered for resale are typically in relatively good condition and still offered at relatively high prices. I suppose the main cause of the high price is that people looking to buy boats have money, and want good quality. On the positive side, this means there is no RIB market for lemons.  Card Zero  (talk) 14:27, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Any/one know anything about the aforementioned 60-year-old planes or RIBs? Pablothepenguin (talk) 19:51, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Size of production run has already been covered.

The engine size may appear to be similar for cars compared to boats or aeroplanes, but there's one difference. Car engines only run at maximum power for a few seconds a time when accelerating or a few minutes when climbing a steep hill at high speed – but most steep roads are to sinuous for high speeds. So car engines are only designed to run at peak power for a short time. Engines of boats and aeroplanes run close to peak power almost all the time. Worse, they have to be more reliable. If a car engine breaks down, you simply coast to a stop; if the same happens in an aeroplane, you have to find a suitable landing spot very nearby or you crash. The engines of racing cars do run at full power all the time; maybe you've noticed how often one breaks down during a race.

As for making them battery-electric, some are. Slow recreational boats have been electric for decades. The sporty ones however need such a high power-to-mass ratio that battery power would only last a very short time, maybe half an hour. For an aeroplane, half an hour is about the limit now and it won't be sporty at all. Go-karts can certainly be made battery-electric or on overhead power (think bumper cars), but some users seem to like the noise and smell. Battery swapping could work, but battery designs must then be standardised and demand high enough, or charged batteries will be waiting for ages before a user comes to pick them up. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:48, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

And yet an electric car can last for over 200 miles. Explain that? Pablothepenguin (talk) 11:43, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Bearing in mind that said cars are much heavier, maybe 2 tonnes, than any boat or go-kart, therefore they take a lot more energy to move and still too 200 miles on a full charge. Explain that? Pablothepenguin (talk) 11:47, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

First, an electric car may carry several hundred kilogrammes of batteries. It's a significant fraction of the loaded vehicle weight and you can't increase that fraction much on other vehicles. And for vehicles lighter compared to the person using it, you'll get less battery compared to loaded weight, therefore less battery compared to energy use (weight is often a decent proxy for energy use), therefore less range. Electric cars only get their decent range at that speed by being heavy compared to their payload (which in turn makes them inefficient).

Second, a car on a motorway only uses about 10 kW of power, something like 50 watts per kilogramme of battery you can put in. The engine is more powerful, but you rarely use it at full power. Our article on Jet Skis mentions that the 2017 model has a 120 kW engine and weighs 250 kg; maybe you could put a 50 kg battery in one of those. As it actually runs close to full power most of the time, that's 2400 watts per kilogramme of battery. The battery will be drained in five minutes. PiusImpavidus (talk) 18:07, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

[Edit conflict] Much of that weight is the battery itself, and a car does not have to either float, or remain airborne. As yet, battery technology has not yet been developed to routinely combine very large energy storage and low weight, safely: storing a large amount of energy in a small space is always a potential bomb or conflagration. Cutting-edge experimentation (for example in the form of Formula E racing cars and MotoE bikes) is ongoing, and has shown rapid progress year by year. As for why various recreational vehicles in electric form have not caught on – it boils down to lack of public demand; manufacturers would offer such vehicles if there was sufficient demand to make them profitable. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 18:23, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I still don’t understand why a 250kg vehicle needs a more “powerful” engine than a 2 tonne vehicle. It just doesn’t make sense to me. Could someone explain the physics behind this? Surely there is no doubt to the fact that 2 tonnes takes 8 times as much energy to move as only 250 kg? So why the discrepancy? I mean, if we have the technology to power a 2 tonne vehicle for 200 miles, then why can’t we do the same with a vehicle one eighth of the weight? I struggle to understand the physics of this and it’s messing with my head.

Also, why are people not faking climate change more seriously? Shouldn’t they prioritise cutting gasoline out of their lives as soon as possible? Pablothepenguin (talk) 19:41, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

Heh. Faking seriously? That's an unfortunate typo. But anyway a jet ski, or a RIB for that matter, is for zooming around, bouncing giddily over the waves. It not only has to go fast, it has to go fast in water, overcoming friction by planing. "To plane, especially to initiate planing, the power-to-weight ratio must be high". This kind of hedonism is not typically associated with environmentalism, although I see an image of an electric jet ski, or "electric personal watercraft", positioned opposite Electric_boat#Efficiency. It has an external link and looks suspiciously like an advert, you may want to check that out before I get round to removing it as promotional.  Card Zero  (talk) 20:46, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I still don’t understand the physics here. You still can’t deny the fact that a 2 tonne vehicle requires eight times as much energy to move as a 250kg vehicle. So, why the big difference in engine power? Surely it is impossible to deny what you can physically see with these numbers. If we can get a 2 tonne vehicle to travel 200 miles on battery power, then what is stopping us from doing the same with a 250kg vehicle? It should only require one eighth of the energy. Pablothepenguin (talk) 00:59, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

If there's no friction, then any tiny force F will move them both the same distance. If we want them to cover the same distance in the same time, a = F/m, so yes, it takes 8 times more. But you should pay attention to the missing f (friction), of which there are many kinds. The watercraft needs more power because it pushes through water. Outboard_motor#Portable says that a 15hp motor (about equivalent to four 50cc scooters) can only move a small dinghy at less than 10 mph.  Card Zero  (talk) 03:14, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

There's quite a big difference between land vehicles and water vehicles. At low speed, a land vehicle mostly suffers from rolling resistance and friction in the drivetrain. This is more or less proportional to weight and independent of speed. A boat mostly suffers from skin drag and wave-making resistance, increasing more or less linearly with speed. As the resistance of the boat has no constant term, it's at low speed much less than that of a land vehicle. That's why freight ships are so efficient.

At high speed this changes. For land vehicles, air drag becomes dominant, roughly increasing with the square of velocity. The speed where this becomes dominant depends on the vehicle, maybe 20 km/h for a bicycle and 70 km/h for some cars. For a boat, the critical point is the hull speed, which depends on the size of the boat. For a kayak it's around 8 km/h, for a big container ship 80 km/h. Once you reach the hull speed, drag increases enormously. For a planing hull it's not as bad as for a displacement hull, but it's still bad. That's why fast boats are such an inefficient way of moving things around. Jet Skis and rigid inflatable boats are designed to work well above their (rather low, because they're small) hull speed, so their drag is huge.

For aeroplanes, drag is proportional to weight and practically independent of speed. If you want to go faster, you go higher, keeping lift and drag constant. The lower density of the air compensates for the higher speed in the drag equation. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:06, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Ok, that seems reasonable. Now I want to know more about my first question. For instance, why is a 60 year old plane still expensive? Also, how do price drops work in the first place?

Also, why are petrol go-karts still a thing? Can’t we get rid of them and use batteries instead? Pablothepenguin (talk) 17:33, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Especially in the US, many people believe that climate change is either a hoax or a natural phenomenon unrelated to human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Apart from that, the price is an issue. I think gasoline-powered go-karts are substantially cheaper than electric ones. The go-karts rented in competitive racing events organized by commercial go-kart track operators need all to be the same type, so switching to an all-electric fleet is a very costly proposition. Also, gas-powered karts produce a more satisfying vroom-vroom noise (satisfying to the driver).  --Lambiam 06:37, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

On aircraft pricing, this source [33] lists pre-owned aircraft for less than $100,000. However, I would hate to be flying in one and need repairs ... DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 20:43, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

That still sounds like a lot. Why are 60 year old planes still that expensive? I’ve seen brand new cars that cost less than that? Pablothepenguin (talk) 21:26, 19 October 2024 (UTC)

Because (a) they're rare, and (b) old things have appeal beyond their utility – see for example Antique.

With reference to your earlier queries, see Electric boat. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.6.86.81 (talk) 05:24, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

It's basic economics: supply and demand, whatever the market will bear. If you offer an object for 1,000 dollars and nobody buys it, you can either keep it or reduce the price until it sells. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:42, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

To return to the electric aircraft question, Wikipedia has (of course) an article called electric aircraft. Most commercially available examples are motor gliders, such as the Lange Antares and Pipistrel Taurus, although a few are proper light aircraft, the Pipistrel Velis Electro for example. A number of passenger aircraft are in the pipeline, the 10-seat Scylax E10 being perhaps the nearest to actual service. Alansplodge (talk) 13:43, 21 October 2024 (UTC)

October 20

Average time for inauguration

I stopped editing about topics surrounding the President-elect of Indonesia Prabowo Subianto for a bit. What is exactly the time for the inauguration ceremony? Ahri Boy (talk) 04:04, 20 October 2024 (UTC)

I did not readily find the time schedule for the ceremony. But, curiously, this article, "Indonesia swears in Prabowo Subianto as the country’s eighth president", was posted "Oct 19, 2024 / 11:04 PM CDT". Since CDT is UTC−05:00, it was posted the very same minute you posted the question.  --Lambiam 05:49, 20 October 2024 (UTC)