Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 September 16

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September 16

Muriatic acid, gelling agent

Does anyone here have experience with muriatic acid and how to make it more jelly like so it sticks on surfaces rather than dripping/running down? I thought about corn starch and other common food ingredients but those I thought about need to be heated up to work as intended, which is not an option with muriatic acid.

Very much appreciated for any knowledgeable input.TMCk (talk) 00:05, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

• Moved to Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science#September 17#Muriatic acid, gelling agent [1]
  TMCk (talk) 01:35, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Piercing parlors

Is there anyone on here who's gotten a piercing in Montreal that can recommend a place that has a great track record for being safe? 69.156.171.5 (talk) 01:17, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Recommendations would be opinion - and we don't answer requests for opinion. AndyTheGrump (talk) 01:36, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

So if someone asks for recommendations for products or services, you never answer them? I find that extraordinarily hard to believe, especially when scores of evidence in the archives prove otherwise. I'm not asking for a medical opinion on the safety and aftercare methods of body piercings. 69.156.171.5 (talk) 02:14, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Try Angie's List or another service like that. We don't provide reliable recommendations for local businesses. It's not what we do here. --Jayron32 02:16, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

If someone happened to ask here for a recommendation for a local business in my city, I would have absolutely no hesitation in giving one. But it's not the kind of question that is likely to get well answered here. Reddit would be a much better bet, specifically [2] or you can do a search like this one et voilà. --Viennese Waltz 09:43, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Even if we happen to have an editor here who has gotten a piercing in Montreal, I seriously doubt that we have more than two. What you want is large numbers of reviews so that you don't have to rely on one person's opinion, and we just don't have anything near that kind of critical mass, aside from the issue that opinions are discouraged here. Marco polo (talk) 13:56, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Jayron and VW have it right. I wouldn't personally have a problem with a rec from a respondent, but it's better to direct OPs to the kind of resources that will help with their questions. That's what we're all about, isn't it? :) SemanticMantis (talk) 14:12, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Paintings by John Scougal, Scottish portrait painter

Why is there no mention in the works of John Scougal of the portraits he has painted in the late 17th Century of the Earls of Marchmont, who are part of the Hume family? I have one of the portraits, that of Captain Robert Hume, son of the First Earl of Marchmont, painted in 1694, hanging in my hallway in Washington DC.

Ian Hume96.227.102.182 (talk) 03:12, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

There are probably at least two reasons. Firstly it is not common in articles about artists to list every work by that artist. Secondly there may not be third party references to the portrait you own to be able to place such information within the article. If you know of any reliable references to your portrait you are free to add the information yourself or leave a message on the article's talk page directing someone else to the citation. Richard Avery (talk) 07:49, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Heroin production

After reading this article, I'm curious just how much of the world's heroin comes from what starts out as legal poppy fields. Am I wrong to think that most heroin comes from illegal fields of poppies much like marijuana or cocaine? Well, maybe marijuana isn't the greatest example. Dismas|^(talk) 03:51, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

As indicated in the article you cite, legal production of opium poppy is limited to only a handful of countries, under the strict supervision of the International Narcotics Control Board, a United Nations agency (its latest annual report is available here [3]). The objective of these controls is to ensure that none of the legal production gets into the illegal stream, and if it did, the country would be in danger of losing its very lucrative mandate to produce legal opium poppies for medical purposes. As a result just about all of the world's heroin comes from illegal fields. --Xuxl (talk) 09:31, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, the article says "...while mitigating the potential for diversion to illegal use...". If the chances are so low, why bother mentioning it? Which lead to my curiosity. Dismas|^(talk) 09:49, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

It's only minimal diversion from legal crop to illegal production because of the oversight mentioned by Xuxl. Presumably having another route to production would allow some of that money spent on oversight to be spent elsewhere by the UN. Also, keep in mind that research scientists and engineers will sometimes grasp at straws when promoting their work to the public. I'll also mention that the opium poppy grows all around the USA and UK not to mention the native range of Asia Minor. I've seen it in gardens in the USA, but also naturalized on roadsides meadows. It is basically legal to grow as a garden plant in USA and UK, but there are laws that make it illegal to process the poppy into a drug. Unlike Heroin, opium is essentially dried poppy latex, so it doesn't even need any "processing" to speak of to turn it into a drug. I guess my point is, there isn't much point in trying to stop poppies from growing, and people from using the sap. On a related note, you might be interested in reading about kratom, which is a tree that grows all over Thailand that can be used as a mild intoxicant. It was banned to protect the opium industry there, because as opium prices went up above local wages, locals stopped buying it and started just chewing leaves that they could find anywhere. There have been several (expensive, useless) campaigns by the Thai government to eradicate this plant from their countryside. So while lab-made opioids might be useful in some contexts, I don't personally think this will have much of any impact on ethnobotannical practices around the world. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:58, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

(EC) Our article Poppy straw says with a source, as do other sources like [4] that there are no reliable estimates for the level of diversion in India. Various sources like that and [5] [6] suggest unlike Turkey, diversion remains a problem in India. This source [7] discusses some of the issues (and does give some very rough estimates of diversion) although it's fairly old.

Note that there's 2 different issues here. Your question relates to the percentage heroin originating from legal production which is probably low and not in itself the main concern since it relates much more to the fact control of illicit production hasn't been successful than whether preventing diversion is successful. The bigger concern as mentioned in these sources is what percentage of legal production is being diverted, since that's what those supporting legal production want to prevent, and it sounds to me like it is considered a problem, at least in India.

On that note, using a different opioid source without diversion probably isn't really that interesting. There's a reason for all this talk of Turkey and India, since as per the sources and others like [8], the US intentionally buys a big percentage from India and Turkey. Not because they're the best in the world at preventing diversion, but because they wanted to try and cut down illicit production by giving farmers them an alternative. Unless the yeast method is combined with nuking production areas, you're still going to have the farmers looking for a way to make money. To be clear, there are also a bunch of historical and political factors at play, and there does need to be some trust (which the US doesn't have for Afghanistan). In fact, I suspect some would suggest the stated diversion free method of producing it in yeast would end up being counter productive. (Also while I didn't read the article, I wonder how the authors plan to ensure their yeast strain doesn't end up the in hands of those in the illicit market. I think history has shown that while they may not be Walter White, they often don't have a problem getting people with sufficient technical skills and I'm sure they're always interested in new methods which may end up being cheaper, e.g. because it's harder to detect.)

Nil Einne (talk) 15:33, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

"Warwick" page

I am a resident of Warwick, New York. When I searched for my town in the search bar, I was brought to Warwick, UK. This is unfair for a number of reasons: the largest Warwick is in Rhode Island, with a population of approximately 82,000. Second is Warwick NY, with a population of 32,000. Warwick UK is only third place, with 30,000. I believed this needs to be changed because why bring up the town where less people live? it should be more specific. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Liammitchell0508 (talk • contribs) 18:07, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Probably more to do with being very old and well established many hundreds of years before the United States was founded, I believe they say size is not everything. MilborneOne (talk) 18:18, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

As for "unfairness", recall that Warwick UK has a castle built in 1068, and the area has been inhabited since the 6th century! Some other users might say it is unfair and US-centric to link to a small, relatively young town in NY or RI over a place that is much older in terms of human habitation, and of much greater historical importance :)

As for the 'problem' -- there are two choices here: make searches of "Warwick" go to Warwick_(disambiguation) -- or pick one of the many Warwicks to come up first. It seems that previous editors have picked the latter solution, probably based on historical reasoning. If the page that comes up is not what the user wanted, they can get there in two more clicks through the disambiguation page at the top of the Warwick UK article. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:23, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

You mean that any place whatsoever in the USA isn't the most important place of its kind, by default, just because it happens to be in the USA? How dare you even suggest such a thing? =) JIP | Talk 18:26, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Maybe the way to solve the problem for Warwick and Worcester is to make the link go to the town that pronounces their name the 'right' way. That should get easy consensus, right?

A suggestion at Talk:Warwick (disambiguation)#Requested move got no consensus to move the disambiguation page to Warwick. PrimeHunter (talk) 18:55, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

This is a consistent pattern at Wikipedia. I just noticed that Worcester directs to the English city, even though Worcester, Massachusetts, has nearly twice the population and has its own historical importance. Does this mean that each English person is twice as important as each American? It is true that English places will have longer recorded histories, but so what? The American places have also been inhabited for thousands of years, sometimes with very ancient archeological evidence. Of course there won't be consensus to remove English towns from their places of privilege as long as there are English people around to block consensus. Wikipedia has its strong points, but the privileging of less important places in England over places with the same name elsewhere is not one of them. Marco polo (talk) 19:20, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Well, the retort is that recorded history and current status are probably the reasons why we use the articles about cities. If I want to know about a famous site for fossils in the western USA, I go to La Brea Tar Pits, not Los Angeles. I didn't mean to dismiss the topics of pre-Columbian NE USA, but I did mean to offer a counterpoint to the OP's notion that population should be the sole criterion for this kind of decision. My perspective is that I see tons of US-centric bias on WP, but maybe I'm just unaware of places where bias may occur toward e.g. the UK. I would personally support every such link going straight to the disambig page, as seems to be the custom for TLAs, but building consensus toward that seems unlikely. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:36, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Since there is really no rational way to decide whether population or length of recorded history is more important, I agree that the only rational solution in cases where one place is not obviously more important than another would be for the unqualified search term to lead to a disambiguation page. That we don't have such a policy is one of the shortcomings of consensus as a process, though I don't actually support ditching consensus, as it is part of the heart and soul of Wikipedia. Marco polo (talk) 20:40, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually we had this problem solved in the first year or two of Wikipedia. All U.S. towns were intentionally put at "city, state". The endless debates where that consensus fell apart cover dozens of pages. Rmhermen (talk) 01:04, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

• It's this sort of "Oh, we English are oh, so important" attitude even when it was the friggin Normans that built the Castle that'll have you in such trouble as of Thursday. I suggest you go with a DAB page for the name rather than waking up to find you've been outvoted by foreigners. and the article is been moved to Warick (UK, rump). μηδείς (talk) 01:17, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

  As opposed to the "We're American, no-one else's opinions are worth a shit" attitude? "Warick" doesn't make any sense at all to anyone who knows how to read and pronounce English. DuncanHill (talk) 16:01, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Sorry, you can have your precious wee double u back. μηδείς (talk) 18:33, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Actually, the real reason that US places are so consistently named "city, state" is that at the VERY beginning of Wikipedia, someone wrote a 'bot' that went through the US census records (or some data source like that) and automatically generated a basic stub article about every single city, town and village in the entire country with boilerplate wording about population size, latitude/longitude and so forth. That established a format that it would be exceedingly painful to go in and change - so it wound up being the standard. To this day, if you pick an unusual language version of Wikipedia, you'll often find that someone used that same bot to create articles on every single US city in a version of Wikipedia that may not even have an article about the capital city of the country in which that language is spoken! In many of the smallest Wikipedia language versions, 90% of the articles are boilerplate from that same original bot. SteveBaker (talk) 17:29, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

The thing about those horrible naming debates (and you'd find it hard to beat the one at Sega Genesis aka "Mega Drive") is that everyone loses sight over the fact that the name of the article is only important to reduce the number of mouse clicks by one or two for people reading the article. If I go to the article names X and I'm at the right place - then it took me zero extra mouse clicks. If there is an "If you wanted X at wibble then see X (wibble)" then it's one mouse click and if there is "if you wanted some other kind of X, then see X (disambiguation)" - then it's two mouse clicks. In every case, the war is over whether it should take zero, one or two mouse clicks to get someplace.

BUT: Joe Public doesn't give a damn. Really. So long as there is a thing above the lede for "X" that tells you that you got to the wrong X" and you should go to X (whatever) instead...that's fine.

So these debates are annoying, pointless and highly disruptive to the smooth operation of the encyclopedia. People make enemies, they don't do any useful editing, they wikilawyer, have votes about the kind of wording should go into the actual vote - then ignore the vote because consensus isn't voting...good editors end up losing their tempers and getting blocked or banned. The end result (if there *is* an end) is unsatisfactory to nearly everyone - and a month later, some innocent bystander says the wrong thing and it blows up all over again. It's just horrible...and for all that time, the readership doesn't give a damn that they have to click the mouse one or two times more to get to an article that's going to take them 10 minutes to read anyway.

Recognizing that fact leads Wikipedia's rule-makers to come up with seemingly unreasonable rules like "Which ever article named 'X' was written first gets to be called "X" - all of the others get to be called "X (whatever) and if there are more than a couple of them, we should make X (disambiguation)"". That's probably not the absolute most optimal way to minimize the average number of mouse clicks required to reach X and X(whatever) by the average reader...but it is the kind of clear-cut rule that helps to eliminate debate and let us get on with the important work of editing the article itself.

If you utterly INSIST on debating which "X" should be "The One True X"...then you should only be arguing from the "which one saves the most mouse clicks" perspective. No other logic makes any sense whatever. So we really' shouldn't care which Warwick is the oldest, has the largest population, the most sex shops or the biggest number of Google hits. The only even slightly useful criterion is whether someone who types "Warwick" into the search bar expects to get to one Warwick or the other. I very much doubt that anyone can tell us the answer to that question with authority - so that makes a crappy rule to use to minimize arguments.

So in the end, we'll have dumb, stupid rules that exist mainly to cut off useless, wasteful, soul-destroying debates like this one is turning out to be. Hence we have rules like "whichever English dialect was used to write the first version of the article is maintained for the life of the article" - or "whichever article used the title first gets to avoid the 'X(whatever)' thing". This can be annoying to you personally - but any other rule you could possibly come up with would be every bit as annoying to someone else. So suck it up...live with it...and don't even think of debating whether "Tire" or "Tyre" should be the name of the article about those rubber things that go on car wheels if there is someone from Tyre in Lebanon ("the oldest city in the world") nearby...trust me, I made that mistake and that's another month of my life I'd like back please!

SteveBaker (talk) 16:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Sometimes the boot is on the other foot. If you type Boston into the searchbar, you get the place in Massachusetts rather than Boston, Lincolnshire which is the town it was named after. Alansplodge (talk) 19:48, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

As it should be, and a case where the unqualified version of the name is applied to the place that is obviously the most important. Likewise, I would never argue that there should be a disambiguation page for London, even though there are several other Londons, including one or two in the United States. In fact, I don't think that there are really many cases where Wikipedia gets this wrong. In fact, most English towns not linked from disambiguation pages really are the most important places with their name. There are those few cases though, where that isn't true. But I take SteveBaker's point that the issue isn't worth a lot of time and rancor. Marco polo (talk) 20:33, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

WP:LAME is a repository of many silly Wikipedia disputes, including a number of arguments about disambiguation. --Dweller (talk) 13:33, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

Pumps?

A photograph I uploaded to WikiMedia Commons was changed from category "Women wearing high-heeled shoes" to "Women wearing pumps". Now, with me being neither a native English speaker or a woman, I don't understand the difference. How are "pumps" different from high-heeled shoes in general? JIP | Talk 18:25, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

Most of the footwear known as pumps of which I'm aware does not have high heels. HiLo48 (talk) 18:40, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

(ec) According to the WIkiCommons category system, "pumps" are considered to be a sub-class of high-heeled shoes. So someone was trying to place your photograph into a tighter classification than the broader class that you chose - which is definitely a good thing in helping people find the specific photographs they need.

HOWEVER: According to our article Court shoe, (which is what a "pump" is...in this context): "A court shoe (British English), or pump (American English), is a shoe with a low-cut front and usually without a fastening. However, some have an ankle strap." I presume the ones you uploaded the photo of were of that sort.

This is a somewhat unfortunate choice of category name because in US english, "pumps" are high heeled shoes - but in British english the word refers to a Plimsoll shoe (like a Converse all-star sneaker). That's a horrible mess - you couldn't imagine a more different style of shoe sharing the same name!! (And actually, this explains some confusions I've had as a Brit living in the USA).

So I guess I'd say that the recategorization of your photograph was OK - but the category itself is unfortunately named for non-US readers.

I think someone should head over to WikiCommons and make an effort to get the category renamed in some less US-centric fashion. That's not going to be easy however because I don't see a term for this sub-category of high-heeled shoe that's common to both US and British english...we simply don't have a shared word here. Perhaps "Women wearing high-heeled pumps" might make better sense.

Ikky!

SteveBaker (talk) 18:54, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I have no problem with there being very different forms of English around the globe, but there is a problem when the users of one form behave as if theirs is the only (correct) one. HiLo48 (talk) 22:11, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I remember getting very confused (and rather worried), when I was 4 and 3/4 and we were told to remember to bring our pumps to school the next day. I didn't have any pumps, though I think I might have seen on or two in old villages. I did have daps however. DuncanHill (talk) 22:19, 16 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree just saying high-heeled shoes would cut out a lot of quite unnecessary confusion and I think it would be a better name for searches as well. Dmcq (talk) 09:57, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

I notice there is a commons:Category:Men wearing high-heeled shoes but not for them wearing pumps so I would guess it is the better established term ;-) There is one painful picture there of a group of soldiers putting on womens' shoes to walk a mile. Dmcq (talk) 10:05, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

But pleasing to see people walking a mile in other people's shoes. Maybe that's how Imelda Marcos acquired her fabulous collection. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 10:31, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

To add confusion, a straw poll of american women I've spoken to over the last day says that almost all of them think "pumps" are shoes with low heels...somewhere intermediate between high heels and 'flats'. So now we have yet another meaning. SteveBaker (talk) 15:56, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

Just to add more to the confusion, I believe that in the UK, "pumps" meaning plimsolls (canvas sneakers in the US perhaps?) is a regional dialect word. In London, they were equally confusingly called "slippers", hence the former school corporal punishment of slippering (ouch!). A quick Google for "ladies pumps" in the UK brings up this sort of thing - low heeled and cut low at the front, like a court shoe without heels. Alansplodge (talk) 17:35, 17 September 2014 (UTC)

It's a good thing the Reebok Pump didn't catch on! APL (talk) 17:02, 19 September 2014 (UTC)