Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 June 6

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June 6

Postal systems

Here in the US, mail is delivered every day except Sundays and holidays. I looked at the page for Royal Mail and see that they have the same schedule. Do we have an article comparing various countries and their delivery times or can someone point me to an external reference for such things? I'm just curious if this is the standard scheme (Every day except Sundays and holidays) or just what. Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 04:01, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Tangentially, I live in the UK and on two occasions in the last few months have had a letter delivered to my house on a Sunday. I suspect, however, that this is represents unofficial action on the part of my postman to spread out his workload, rather than any officially sanctioned arrangement. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.233 (talk) 15:39, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Just a very, very short one: way outside cities, in rural areas and on islands (normal, not delivery service) mail is not delivered every day except Sundays. My parents, who live a few kilometres away from the closest larger locality (quite a small city in itself) get mail delivered about twice a week. --Ouro (blah blah) 04:39, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I assume you are looking for just the standard First Class mail, and not other options like Express mail (which is deliveries 365 days a year?) ^Avic_ennasis @ 04:59, 4 Sivan 5771 / 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm just talking about regular first class mail. Dismas|^(talk) 05:26, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

In highly urban areas for domestic service Australia Post delivers M-F, holidays excepted. Some areas may experience between 2–4 deliveries weekly. See: their own description of their provision standards. Fifelfoo (talk) 05:39, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I can't find any info about this on Canada Post's website, but they don't deliver on Saturdays or Sundays, except sometimes during December. I'm not sure about the normal schedule of La Poste in France, but I did receive a package on a Saturday once (maybe only because it was pretty big and couldn't be delivered normally). Adam Bishop (talk) 08:24, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I can't find an overarching summary, unfortunately, but the Congressional Research Service put together this report on five- versus six-day delivery schedules in response to the U.S. Postal Service's proposal to end Saturday deliveries. The summary notes:

Other countries’ mail services vary in their delivery schedules. Australia, Sweden, and Canada offer five-day delivery services. France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (UK) have six-day delivery. New Zealand offers some customers a six-day delivery option, but charges additional fees for weekend deliveries.

There's also a table on page 21 which goes into more detail about those countries' practices. (Canada Post, for instance, adds a sixth day of delivery in December to cope with the added holiday demand; they also operate a network of service counters – often sharing space in pharmacies – which provide six- or seven-day sales service and parcel pickup. New Zealand's Saturday delivery is not available to rural customers, charges a premium for Saturday deliveries, and does not include parcel service.) TenOfAllTrades(talk) 13:45, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

The info on NZ appears to be incorrect or misleading (at least from the summary, I didn't read the source). The premium is only for RegistedPost and CourierPost [1]. Ordinary letters are the same price for Saturday deliveries. Note that for CourierPost, if a signature is required and the recipient is not home on the first attempt, you get a 'Card to Call' and if you don't arrange delivery for another date or location or pickup the item, delivery will be reattempted on Saturday without additional charge. [2] I think something similar happens with other signature required items.

BTW the days which NZ post doesn't operate on are here [3]. There are persistent talks of cancelling Saturday deliveries or other more radical options (like every second day) e.g. [4] but they usually amount to nothing [5].

P.S. As with a number of countries but unlike the US, I think Canada and others, New Zealand post doesn't have a statutory monopoly on postal deliveries but instead are legally open to full competition. [6] However this only happened in 1998 when the internet had already started to take over and while some competing companies did crop up they never had much success. But there could be some small postal operator that no one uses that delivers on Sundays or whatever.

Nil Einne (talk) 02:13, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

A comparison of various national delivery schedules might be placed in Mail, just as United States Postal Service has a section on "Delivery days." Mail might also note the rise and decline of frequent deliveries to residences and business in cities. There is probably enough coverage of "mail delivery" in reliable sources to justify a standalone article. A test of daily free rural delivery in numerous small towns , started in 1890, was reviewed complete with coverage of it reprinted from 258 newspapers in the affected areas. See "Free delivery system in rural districts," pages 1- 180, US Senate documents, 1891-1892. The Council Bluffs Globe (p 14) noted that before the experiment, mail service was no better than a century earlier, and a farmer wishing to mail a letter might have to ride 10 miles to a post office. If a letter came for a farmer, it was held at the post office, however many miles away, until he called for it (p18). Some papers in large cities (p179) said that the farmer should go to town once a week anyway, for banking, or to buy supplies or have equipment mended, and that was soon enough for him to send and receive mail, and that it would be better to cut the cost of a stamp from 2 to 1 cent than to improve rural mail service. P18 said that in England, there were morning and afternoon deliveries in city and country. The same article said that in many European countries, those in the country had delivery about as good as those in the city. The US, at least had much national discussion of the merits of "free delivery." In US cities, there were multiple deliveries daily in former years, and 7 day deliveries until 1912. Sunday delivery was eliminated to please religionists in 1912. In some 7th Day Adventist towns, there was Sunday but no Saturday delivery. (If present day delivery schedules are important enough for an encyclopedia then so are former delivery schedules). Free mail delivery in US cities was authorized by Congress in 1863. New York City had as many as 4 deliveries a day. By the 1940's it was reduced to 2 deliveries a day for residences, but businesses still got 4 per day. By 1950 it was down to one per day for homes. Second deliveries to businesses continued to the 1990s. Did other major world cities have a similar rise and decline of delivery? It sounds like in the early 2oth century one might have been able to have multiple round-trip mail exchanges in a 24 hour period in the same city, if the sorting office was efficient. Edison (talk) 16:16, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

That was especially handy for those who lacked telephones. Also, in the old days (not that long ago, really) you didn't have to write the actual name of the destination city if you were sending it across town - you could merely write "City" and the local city was assumed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:44, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Today, in many instances of email correspondence, the person checks his mail only once or twice a day. If there were 4 visits a day my the mail carrier, I could have done as well as today (note that I don't text much). In Sherlock Holmes stories from the late 19th century, if memory serves, he and clients would sometimes bounce letters back and forth within the same day. Edison (talk) 16:51, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I found a 1901 US government source "Commission to investigate the Postal Service" which said that people in town routinely sent a letter and received a reply the same day. In central business districts, two such round trips in one day were possible p10). The business district in Boston got 7 mail deliveries a day. Rather than today's internet, which was once incorrectly called a Series of tubes, in 1901 fast mail delivery in New York and Boston actually used a system of pneumatic tubes(p12): an 8 inch tube, carrying 10 carriers per minute, from the main post office to and from the train station. The NY tubes ran 3.5 miles. London had 2.5 inch tubes which carried 35,000,000 letters per year. Paris and Berlin also had tubes. Edison (talk) 18:09, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Belgium originally had seven day service - the stamps had removable tabs for "do not deliver on Sunday" for the religious senders. Collect (talk) 16:56, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

In 1879, service in London peaked at twelve daily deliveries (in the East-Central area; other central areas made do with eleven), and even in the suburbs, there were eight. See Dickens' Dictionary of London. Shimgray | talk | 01:23, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Peugeot 505 in Canada

Why Peugeot 505 was the only Peugeot model to be available in Canada? Why not others? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.95.105.176 (talk) 14:32, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

As experienced by other European volume car makers, Peugeot's U.S. and Canadian sales faltered and finally became uneconomical, as the Peugeot 505 design aged. For a time, distribution in the Canadian market was handled by Chrysler. Several ideas to turn around sales in the United States, such as including the Peugeot 205 in its lineup, were considered but not pursued. In the early nineties, the newly introduced Peugeot 405 proved uncompetitive with domestic and import models in the same market segment, and sold less than 1,000 units. Total sales fell to 4,261 units in 1990 and 2,240 through July, 1991. This caused the company to cease U.S. and Canada operations after 33 years. There are currently no known plans to return to the U.S. market. - Peugeot article.

From the looks of it, the 405 was also in Canada. (Google searches show used 405's for sale in Canada.) The company is based in France, and apparently never found a good market in Canada, so it didn't bother bringing over newer cars. ^Avic_ennasis @ 15:27, 4 Sivan 5771 / 6 June 2011 (UTC)

The 405 was indeed available in Canada for a few years in 1989-92; I'm one of the few people who bought one. Speaking specifically of the Canadian market (but this also applies to a certain extent to the U.S., especially California), vehicles sold in Canada must meet specific safety and ecological standards that are very different from European ones. These include things like placement of headlights and turn signals, bumper design, crash test features, emissions control equipment... It is usually not possible to modify a vehicle designed for the European market to make it meet Canadian standards; a separate version of the vehicle must be built for the Canadian market, and then meet crash tests and comply with other standards set by Transport Canada. This is done at the manufacturer's expense and is quite expensive. It is not worth it unless a manufacturer is making a major push in the Canadian (or, more realisticly, the North American) market. Peugeot made a calculation that its growth market was in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, and not in North America, and pulled out of here circa 1992. Unless they design a vehicle that is so popular in Europe or elsewhere that North American consumers are clamouring to have it imported here, this is unlikely to change. --Xuxl (talk) 18:18, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Capital of Palestine

Where do you get the source for naming Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine? (ist of capital cities of the world — Preceding unsigned comment added by Apuka (talk • contribs) 18:39, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

The article State of Palestine lists three sources for that fact. APL (talk) 18:56, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

That article makes it clear that the so-called "State of Palistine", on the west bank of the Jordan, is vaporware. Given that, they can claim any city they want as their capital. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:18, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The OP appears to be referring to List of national capitals or a similar article. The article links to Positions on Jerusalem for an explanation Nil Einne (talk) 01:56, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm amazed at such a thing, though I probably shouldn't be. There is no actual "State of Palestine" except in the wishful-thinking world. However, if the UN recognizes it, then theoretically it belongs on the list (as opposed to Sealand, for example). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:32, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

BB, the State of Palestine is actually recognised by quite a few countries as either a legitimate state or some kind of proto-state or preparatory state. Although I can understand why you would not have been aware of this given that such a viewpoint is probably less common in the US. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 04:13, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The map at State of Palestine#International recognition and foreign relations is quite telling. The State of Palestine is recognised by most countries on earth, but (apparently) not the ones that matter - i.e. North America, Western Europe and Australia. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 04:18, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

If Palestinian leaders ever decide to work together with Israelis instead of trying to kill them off, maybe they could have their "State of Palestine"... especially if they stop and think what a bonanza, what a cash-cow, a peaceful Holy Land would be, as a tourist Mecca (pardon the ironic metaphor). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:15, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

If Israeli leaders ever decide to work together with Palestinians instead of trying to kill them off, maybe they could have their secure state of Israel .. especially if they stop and think what a bonanza, what a cash-cow, a peaceful Holy Land would be, as a tourist Mecca (pardon the sarcastic rephrasing). --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 05:48, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

I can never remember what is the capital of Sealand. --Trovatore (talk) 03:23, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

It used to be Sealand, but it was outsourced to Jerusalem. Also, its monetary unit is the same as the US, so its capital is expressed in dollars. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:11, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Well the list doesn't just show things the UN recognises. It has Republic of China (Taiwan) for example. It also lists non sovereign places whose non-sovereignty isn't in dispute. Palestine isn't the only one without any control over their capital since it also lists Western Sahara (El Aaiún remains controlled by Morocco). And Nicosia is another example (other than Jerusalem) of a disputed capital although the Northern Cyprus government has defacto control over their claimed portion. Nil Einne (talk) 03:04, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Verifiability is sort of like statistical significance -- with enough power, you can assert anything. DRosenbach ^{(Talk | Contribs)} 03:57, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The "State of Palestine" strikes me as being about as tangible as "Moosylvania". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:00, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

These anti-Palestinian rants are tangential to the question. Clearly, the Palestinian people have a national consciousness, and the Palestinian Authority is a state structure. It even has boundaries that are recognized by every nation on Earth apart from Israel and apart from periodic U.S. equivocation. Finally, a nation need not be a nation-state to have a capital. Look at Scotland or Wales, for example. Furthermore, a capital, such as Amsterdam, need not be the seat of government. Marco polo (talk) 14:23, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Is "Moosylvania" recognized as a sovereign state by 94 countries? Your view on this issue is very simplistic and condescending, not to mention irrelevant and unhelpful with regard to the question at hand. -Elmer Clark (talk) 14:53, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

How many of those 94 also recognize Israel? Not all of them, I bet. Meanwhile, the OP's question has been answered already, so "helpful" or "unhelpful" at this point really is not relevant. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:34, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

"simplistic and condescending" is relevant. Staecker (talk) 16:36, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

How many of those 94 also recognize Israel? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:40, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I am baffled at the apparent relevance of a fictional nation on a fictional island to a real polity (however disputed) in a real place... That aside, per Foreign relations of Israel, 36 UN-member states have no diplomatic relations with Israel; however, only 22 are listed as explicitly never having recognised them. I am not sure of the exact status of the other 14 (can you break diplomatic relations without thus denying recognition?), but the answer is thus presumably "between 58 and 72", or 30-40% of the world's countries. Prominent states recognising both appear to include Russia, India, China, Brazil, and South Africa, as well as Egypt and Jordan, two nations sharing borders with Israel/Palestine. Shimgray | talk | 00:18, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

There are two questions here. One is if the State of Palestine exists, and the other is, if it exists, is Jerusalem its capital. The Montevideo Convention definition of a state is one that has a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and a capacity to enter into relations with the other states. Taiwan clearly has that; Palestine doesn't. The Palestinians themselves would tell you that the current Palestinian Authority, with limited powers, is not the same as the State of Palestine. When a country recognizes the "State of Palestine," what they're really doing is recognizing the right of a Palestinian state to exist eventually. An analogy (in legal terms only) would be the Baltic States after WWII. The U.S. never recognized the Soviet annexation of the countries and kept up the legal fiction that they existed continuously. But no one in reality would have called Estonia an independent state between WWII and the breakup of the Soviet Union. The second question is whether, if we are to consider the State of Palestine to be the same as the Palestinian Authority, is Jerusalem really its capital. At most, we can call Jerusalem a de jure capital of Palestine, as the city is under Israeli control and all of the PA's operations are out of Ramallah or Gaza (making those de facto capitals). To put it another way, if the republic of Ireland decided tomorrow that its capital was really Belfast, while continuing to operated out of Dublin, it would not make Belfast the capital of Ireland. So basically, Palestine should probably not be on the list, and if it is on the list, Jerusalem should be described as a de jure capital with Ramallah and Gaza listed as de facto capitals. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 00:42, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

It's perhaps worth repeating what I said earlier which is the list (which is called 'List of national capitals') includes entities which are clearly not sovereign states and which most people including those living there would claim or desire otherwise. It's also perhaps worth remembering that a Capital city is not always the seat of government but instead, at least, when the place has control is accepted as what the place says it is no matter what actually happens or is done there. (More complicated discussions like the article on the respective places may explain the situation when it is complicated and there are various cities fulfilling roles traditionally considered part of the capital city.) BTW the link in the article is to Palestinian territories, I don't actually get why people are still talking about the state of Palestine since it's only discussed in terms of who recognises that. Nil Einne (talk) 13:11, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

Simulating consciousness

Who popularized the idea that if you simulated a human (in a computer) the simulated human would be conscious? --85.77.70.150 (talk) 23:01, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

I think most people would credit that to Alan Turing in his essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence, where he formulated the so-called Turing test. He didn't specifically claim that a simulated human would be conscious, because he regarded words such as "consciousness" and "thinking" as too ambiguous to be used precisely, but that is the gist of what he was arguing for. Looie496 (talk) 23:27, 6 June 2011 (UTC)

Interesting article. The way I read it, the Turing test is not so much about whether a machine is truly conscious, i.e. is aware of its own existence; but rather whether such a machine can be sufficiently sophisticated so as to appear to be conscious. That kind of situation has been explored in Sci-Fi. It was a concept in at least one Star Trek episode that I recall, where the inhabitants of a planet were being ruled by a "god" that was actually a highly sophisticated machine. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:31, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, this is a central issue in the philosophy of mind, and the literature relating to it is truly vast. Our article on the Chinese room discusses some of the most popular arguments. Looie496 (talk) 00:44, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Another interesting article. Another aspect to this is the seemingly built-in assumption (as expressed by the OP) that consciousness should equate to human consciousness. We all know what human consciousness is about, because we are of that species. But do we really know what the consciousness of a dog or cat or a flatworm would be like, without becoming one of those creatures? So, putting aside the difficult problem of trying to make a machine appear to be human - is it possible to define what the consciousness of a machine "should be" or "could be" like? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:57, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, you're asking all the right questions, but every question you are asking is the topic of several dozen books, all expressing different points of view. My own point of view is that it is possible to define what the consciousness of a machine should be or could be like, but I can't defend it in an answer that would fit on the Reference desk. Looie496 (talk) 01:09, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Understood, Captain. :) ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:29, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Has there been any attempt to create a human-simulator that could do "small talk"? For example, two guys get on the phone for a business call, and first they break the ice with one of them saying, "How about those Cubs?" and the other one maybe saying, "They really suck this year, don't they?" Has there been a machine constructed that could carry on such a conversation? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:04, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, several, to different degrees of perfection. Take a look at Loebner Prize. Now if they couple those chatbots with Cyc and Watson, we are in really interesting territory... --Stephan Schulz (talk) 01:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

In respect to the Turing test, one of the criticisms has been that human small talk is actually pretty easy to simulate. It's predictable and lacks depth. Many of the bots which have won Turing test contests have been ones that just recycle snippets of actual human conversations. It's just one of the little things that emphasizes how difficult it is to pin down what we mean by intelligence, language, consciousness, etc. In the 1950s, people thought chess playing was a great way to build A.I. machines — now we more or less understand that it's just a great way to build chess bots. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:20, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Is it reasonable to assume that HAL was intended to be the ultimate in AI engineering? One thing the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey left out is the book's detail that HAL was programmed to lose at chess 50 percent of the time, otherwise it would have been pointless to play. But I wonder how HAL could "throw" the game without it being obvious? The movie also contains the ultimate "joke" - that a machine with a truly human consciousness, but without a conscience or a moral perspective, could be dangerously flawed. Did Turing look into that problem, or was that extrapolated by others? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:28, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Hal could be calibrated to lose 50% of the time the same way modern chess programs are: By adjusting their search-depth to match the human's skill level. Chess programs don't intentionally make bad moves. APL (talk) 02:37, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

I see. As for the "conscience" issue, do you know if Turing ever explored that? I don't think it was covered in the article. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:40, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Or we could calibrate HAL to lose to Dave (but not Frank) on the same basis that lovers often cross-calibrate to avoid ruining the relationship. Unfortunately this would mean that HAL would jealously beat Frank's chess capacity into a pulp. Fifelfoo (talk) 05:36, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

The OP and all involved should familiarize themselves with the philosophy of behaviorism, which holds that unmeasuable phenomena like sapience or sentience or consciousness or other issues of the "mind" aren't real, excepting insofar as such "internal processes" produce observable effects. The Turing Test is fundementally a behaviorism-type construct. A good read in this regard is also the hard problem of consciousness, which deals philosophically with what the OP is getting at. --Jayron32 06:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Another very interesting article. This is one area where religion kind of has an edge. Their answer to the question is "the soul". That's a bit argumentive and circular, but it makes some practical sense... and it doesn't necessarily require the existence of a God either. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 12:07, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Also, see functionalism (philosophy of mind). The Turing Test is essentially a duck test; it's underlying premise is that if something appears to be conscious then the most rational stance is to treat it as if it were conscious, rather than look for abstruse reasons why it ought not to be conscious. Gandalf61 (talk) 14:54, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

"The soul" opens up more problems than it solves. Does someone with a split-brain have one soul or two? The more you learn about how the brain actually works, the more difficult it gets to see any single governing force — it's a huge, messy, unbelievably complicated biological organ that does amazing, incredible things. At some point, if you start working to re-insert "the soul" in at various places, you're really just coming up with a new definition of "consciousness," which was the whole problem "the soul" was supposed to make easy. What makes the human brain a difficult thing to study is that we have to reconcile everything with learn with our individual experiences, even though the evidence is pretty strong that our individual experience of consciousness itself is not the direct-experience-with-reality that we perceive it to be. (This article recently reinforced this to me.) --Mr.98 (talk) 14:51, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

See also qualia. ~AH1 ^(discuss!) 17:43, 11 June 2011 (UTC)