This page lists all the recent questions asked on the Wikipedia reference desk by category. To ask a new question, please select one of the categories below. To answer a question, click on the "edit" link beside the question.
@TheTechie: Serial Number 54129 asked how long it would take to run Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool on a pc with 96GB RAM. They heard it took an hour per 8GB, so that would be 12 hours for 96GB. Then they say that they tried it and that it took less than 2 hours. Polygnotus (talk) 15:39, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To avoid videos with crocheting Chinese ladies and such – if that's not your thing – make sure the video is from the original channel and not some pirated and hacked video. The name of the channel (such as Eyewitness News ABC7NY, Jimmy Kimmel Live, ESPN MBL, ...) is given below the title of the video. Pirated videos come from an unfamiliar channel; other than that, everything looks the same as the legit video. --Lambiam07:35, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello all. I have a seemingly one-off, weird and annoying issue. I am using an HP laptop computer:
OS Name Microsoft Windows 10 Home
System Model HP Spectre x360 Convertible
Version 10.0.19045
Build 19045
Every time I type a quote mark on this computer (or an apostrophe using the same keyboard key without shifting) nothing happens. It is only when I invoke the character key a second time (in a row, without moving the cursor) that anything happens, which is that, only then, TWO quote marks appear. I then I have to delete one of them. Same thing for apostrophes, though I use quotes far more frequently. This happens anywhere I attempt to type the character, including when I placed this one " right now. Please note that the key is not gummed up or anything, it always works to place the two after I type the character the second time. Any ideas?
--68.129.153.226 (talk) 17:23, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My 13-year old Mac Mini has stopped working. (I have already purchased a new computer, arriving in about two weeks.) I thus borrowed this HP from my sister a week ago, whereupon I discovered this issue. I thus have no idea of the timeline of the problem.--68.129.153.226 (talk) 21:07, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What happens if you type a single ' or ", followed by some other character, like a letter?
It sounds like you're in some strange mode which is attempting to interpret various multi-keystroke sequences. Those can be perfectly ordinary — for example, as you may know, on a Mac you can type Option-U to get a bare umlaut, which when you then type a letter like A or U combines with it to form Ä or Ü. But obviously these " and ' sequences you're encountering are bizarre and unwanted! (I've never heard of combining sequences starting with " or ', either.)
My guess is that these sequences are defined for the convenience of typists in some language other than English. I would go to the relevant control panel — perhaps "Keyboard", although under Windows I'm not sure — and make sure you've got English specified as your language, with no funny extra options specified. —scs (talk) 22:10, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Per the below, it sounds like you might well see different behavior depending on whether you type the " or ' followed by a vowel like A or U, versus a consonant like B or S. —scs (talk) 22:16, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes you're right. When you're on the international keyboard (or other non-English one) if you type a quote and then a vowel you get an umlaut. With this keyboard layout the first time you press a quote key it will not type it, and you have to press it twice to type a quote.
On Windows 10, on the bottom right, to the left of the date and time, there is an area where you can click to change the keyboard layout. For the international keyboard it is "ENG INTL". If you click it you can change to the normal keyboard, "ENG" or "ENG US" or whatever you prefer. ―Panamitsu(talk)22:23, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
See dead key. I suppose your system is configured to see ' and " as dead keys, producing no direct output, but combining with the next character you type to create a letter with acute accent or two dots. I haven't used Windows since XP days, but I suppose that if the following character doesn't accept those diacritics, the ' or " is inserted after all. Try switching to a different keyboard layout. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:37, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Have you tried a "+space sequence? I've seen such behavior of a keyboard in Windows when working in a language with diacritic letters. It simulates old typewriter - hit a diacritic symbol first, which gets printed with no carriage move, then hit a letter, which gets printed at the same place and then a carriage advances to a next position. Following this mode you hit a diacritic + space sequence to get a diacritic symbol alone. --CiaPan (talk) 15:38, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am on Windows 10 on Dell laptop. I have experienced this behavior and I suspect it started after some OS update.
But note that, when you wish to include anything in double/single quote, you must continue to type as usual. The double/single quote becomes visible only after you type any following character (not just single/double quote).
You may be already aware of it, but I thought if you don't know, it will be less frustrating experience once you know how it works. manya (talk) 06:04, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My old laptop computer developed problems with the power, so that it wouldn't start when connected to regular line current. It would start when connected to high-amperage current in an electronics store, but that wasn't useful, and it was time to replace it after five years. I now have some questions about problems with a new laptop computer. The new laptop computer is an HP running Windows 11. Robert McClenon (talk) 04:43, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sometimes when I am typing in a Word document or editing Wikipedia in a source window, I discover that the cursor isn't where I think it should be. The cursor has jumped to somewhere else on the screen, apparently randomly. I have to do a Ctrl-Z to undo what I typed in the wrong place, and then move the cursor back to where I want it. If this is caused by line noise, how do I minimize the impact? How likely is that a new mouse would resolve the problem? Are there any settings that I should diddle with?
Robert McClenon (talk) 04:43, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Possibly due to your hand brushing the trackpad while typing. If you have a mouse, you could experiment with disabling the trackpad: how to disable touchpad on hp laptop. Or even just try turning it off while typing. This erratic caret jumping used to happen to me a lot, too, when my laptop was new, until I found the key to disable the trackpad.
I now have a possibly useless question. The documentation referred to an option that disables the touchpad when there is a mouse, but the only option that I found in the settings is the option that always disables the touchpad. I would like to specify that the touchpad is disabled when there is a mouse, and enable it if there is no mouse. This makes very little difference because I will always use a mouse. Is it possible that that option isn't available on my computer? This isn't important. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:38, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
With the old laptop, I had set up network file sharing, so that the laptop computer could view and edit files in shared folders on my desktop computer, a Dell, also running Windows 11, if they were both within range of my wireless router (and the desktop computer always is). The desktop computer could also access files in shared folders on the laptop, if the laptop was I have tried to set up network file sharing with the new laptop computer. I tried calling the technical support offered by the electronics chain that I bought the computers from, and I made seven calls to them, none of which worked, and I have concluded that their technical support people don't know what they are doing, and, worse, don't know the limits of their knowledge. Does anyone have advice on a book that will tell me how to set up network file sharing with Windows 11, that has neither too little nor too much information for a retired database engineer?
Robert McClenon (talk) 04:43, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
User:TheTechie - Thank you. That describes the basics, and describes what I had done successfully with the previous laptop computer. I need either a much greater level of detail, or a troubleshooting guide, or something like that. That was helpful in that it doesn't point out anything that I am doing wrong. Robert McClenon (talk) 02:31, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hello there. I'm have a question: How to scan all available online streams from a specified server and port given? For example, I've found a Wowza Streaming Engine server at 115.79.46.164 and port 1935. I want to know which website or software can help me to find all active streams on this server. Thanks for reading. Ccv2020 (talk) 14:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By (purely) physical property, I mean any measured property whose measurement depends on (purely) physical [dimensions usually measured by physical] units. A few examples of physical properties include: momentum, energy, electric charge, magnetic charge, velocity, and the like (actually the elementary particles carry plenty of purely physical properties).
However, by purely (physical property), I mean that it's not also a mathematical or geometric property, i.e. excluding: numeric value (size) of a physical property, density of energy ("density" is also a mathematical concept - e.g. in density of primes), center of mass ("center" is also a geometric concept), and the like. But I do consider velocity to be a purely physical property, because its description invloves (e.g.) the temporal dimension (which actually "flows" - whereas the way time "flows" can't be described by any mathematical equation. Anyway this "flow" is another issue I don't want to discuss in this thread).
So, for finding a purely "physical property of a physical property" (of a body), I've thought about one example so far: the physical units dimensions of any physical property.
A friend's physicist father opined that the phantom energy causing more and more rapid cosmic expansion will never be as strong as the attraction of the strong force, so protons will not be ripped apart in the big rip. Be that as it may, if the phantom energy is counter to the strong force, however weakly, wouldn't protons, consisting of quarks held together by the strong force, have an increased rate of decay in the far future? I have heard that the theories that protons do undergo decay at all have not yet been supported by experiments, though. Rich (talk) 13:41, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have to suppose quite a few things to get to the question: suppose there is some form of proton decay, suppose there is phantom energy, and suppose that the phantom energy reaches some plateau before getting to an energy scale high enough to create a quark-gluon plasma. Would protons then decay at a faster rate? I don't think that's necessarily the case. Proton decay is not the same kind of process as making a quark-gluon plasma. I believe the answer depends on what kinds of operators lead to the hypothetical proton decay. --Amble (talk) 22:49, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, nice clarification of the issues. You've thought through the issues more clearly and knowledgeably than I did. That's a valuable answer. But having said that, is there more information available about current speculations and theoretical work by physicists concerning proton decay interacts with cosmic expansion? I can't be the only one wondering about it and many of the people wondering about it would be physicists.Rich (talk) 07:30, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At the top of this page is a bullet point stating "We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate": this reads to me like a request for subjective opinions. Perhaps you would like to consider what quantifiable and referenceable metric would answer what you want to know?
FWIW, I can't detect any visible differences between the plant in this photo and the ones illustrated in the species and the genus articles. However, the latter makes it clear that Polygala is a large genus, and is cultivated, with hybrids, so it's possible that this one could be a close relative that differs in ways not visible here, such as in the bark or roots. That may or may not matter for your purposes. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 10:11, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Hi all,
I am a biology student brand new to wiki editing who is interested in cleaning up small articles/stubs for less known taxa. One that I've encountered is a mushroom that occurs in the pacific northwest (Fomitopsis ochracea). The article mentions that this fungus is occasionally mistaken for another fungus, Fomitopsis pinicola.
However, the issue I've run into is that F. pinicola used to be considered a single species found around the world, but relatively recently was split into a few different species. The original name was given to the one that occurs in Europe, and the one in the pacific northwest (and thus could be mistaken for F. ochracea) was given the name Fomitopsis mounceae.
The wiki page says
Historically, this fungus has been misidentified as F. pinicola. When both species are immature, they can look very similar, but can be distinguished by lighting a match next to the surface of the fungus.[1] F. pinicola will boil and melt in heat, while F. ochracea will not.[1]
Since the source says pinicola (as likely do most/all other sources of this info given the change was so recent), and since technically it's true that they used to be mistaken for it... what would be the most appropriate way to modernize that section?
My questions are:
Should I replace F. pinicola with F. mounceae? Or is that wrong because the source doesn't refer to it by that name? Would it be better to write something like (now known as/considered F. mounceae) next to the first mention of the species? Or is that a poor choice because it implies all the members of F. pinicola were renamed F. mounceae?
Thanks for the tips, I didn't know about projects so I'll go read up on that. And thanks for the warnings about replacing things. I've been reading a lot of help pages, but I'm still in the process of learning the all conventions and what mechanics break if you do things the wrong way.
I actually saw the recipe ages ago before I made my account and completely forgot about it... it was one of many things that prompted me to get into wiki editing. TheCoccomycesGang (talk) 23:12, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Does stopping masturbation lead to sperm DNA damage?
I'm looking for information on the potential link between the frequency of ejaculation (specifically through masturbation) and sperm DNA damage. I've come across some conflicting information and would appreciate it if someone could point me towards reliable scientific studies or reviews that address this topic.
Specifically, I'm interested in whether prolonged periods of abstinence from ejaculation might have any negative effects on sperm DNA integrity. Any insights or links to relevant research would be greatly appreciated. HarryOrange (talk) 17:08, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Only males may abstain from sperm-releasing Masturbation that serves to flush the genital tract of old sperm that in any case will eventually dissipate. No causal relationship between masturbation and any form of mental or physical disorder has been found but abstinence may be thought or taught123 to increase the chance of wanted conception during subsequent intercourse. Philvoids (talk) 00:51, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Mature sperm cells do not have DNA repair capability.[3] Inevitably, as sperm cells get older, they will naturally and unavoidably be subject to more and more DNA damage. Obviously, freshly produced spermatozoa will, on average, have less DNA damage. It is reasonable to assume that the expected amount of damage is proportional to the age of the cells, which is consistent with what studies appear to find. Also, obviously, the more the damage is to a spermatozoon fertilizing an oocyte, the larger the likelihood that the DNA repair in the resulting zygote, which does have DNA repair capability, will be incomplete. The studies I've looked at did not allow me to assess how much this is of practical significance. --Lambiam09:40, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks to those who answered my last question, I think it should be added to a disambiguation page. If anyone wants to help me write that, reach out.
A sandpile seems disorganized and inert, but these are critically self-organizing. Do the frequency and size of disturbances on sand dunes and snowy peaks follow power law distribution?
Gongula Spring (talk) 01:18, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the question is not about the model mentioned in the heading but about the physical properties of sand dunes and snowy peaks, this here is the right section of the Reference desk. --Lambiam08:51, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It depends is probably a fairly reasonable non-mathematical answer for these kinds of systems. For sand dunes anyway, sometimes avalanche frequency is irregular and the size distribution follows a power law, and sometimes it's close to periodic and the avalanches span the whole system. It seems there are multiple regimes, and these kinds of systems switch between them. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:35, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you! I'm impressed this seems so casual, but surely you read this somewhere that might have a URL?
Hi, this is an interesting and somewhat open question! A lot of work is done on these models but much less on careful analyses of real dunes. I did find this dissertation that is freely accessible and describes some physical experiments and how well they fit various models. The general answer seems to be that the power law models are highly idealized, and determining the degree to which any real system's behavior is predicted by the model ahead of time is very difficult. Update: This is one of the earlier important works on the topic and it does include discussion of how well the model fits experiments.SemanticMantis (talk) 17:21, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any common or scientific names for types of polar night? The types that I use are:
polar night - meaning a day when sun's altitude remains below horizon entire day (there is no daylight at solar noon, only civil twilight), occurring poleward from 67°24′ north or south
civil polar night - meaning a day when sun's altitude remains below -6° entire day (there is no civil twilight at solar noon, only nautical twilight), occurring poleward from 72°34′ north or south
nautical polar night - meaning a day when sun's altitude remains below -12° entire day (there is no nautical twilight at solar noon, only astronomical twilight), occurring poleward from 78°34′ north or south
astronomical polar night - meaning a day when sun's altitude remains below -18° entire day (there is no astronomical twilight at solar noon, only night), occurring poleward from 84°34′ north or south
These names were changed on Polar night article, and I wnat to know whether these named I listed are in use in any scientific papers, or in common language. (And I posted that question here and not in language desk because I think that this is not related to language very tightly.)
--40bus (talk) 18:56, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
These seem to be generalizable as: X polar night is a period, lasting not less than 24 hours, during which the sun remains below the horizon and there is no X twilight. The specific definitions depend then on the specific definitions of civil/nautical/astronomical twilight. These can be defined with a subjective observational standard or with an (originally experimentally determined) objective standard. --Lambiam10:36, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, I as a former amateur astronomer have never previously thought about the question of Polar twilight and night nomenclatures, but immediately and completely understood what the (previously unencountered) terms used in the query must mean without having to read the attached descriptions. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 16:34, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In an intro ODE class one basically studies the equation where x is a real vector and A is a real matrix. A typically has complex eigenvalues, giving a periodic or oscillating solution to the equation. That is very important in physics, which has various sorts of harmonic oscillators everywhere. If A and x are complex instead of real, mathematically the ODE theory works out about the same way. I don't know what happens with PDE's since I haven't really studied them.
My question is whether the complex case is important in physics the way the real case is. Can one arrive at it through straightforward coordinate transformations? Do the complex eigenvalues "output" from one equation find their way into the "input" of some other equation? Does the distance metric matter? I.e. in math and old-fashioned physics we use the Euclidean metric, but in realtivity one uses the Minkowski metric, so I'm wondering if that leads to complex numbers. This is all motivated partly by wondering where all the complex numbers in quantum mechanics come from. Thanks. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:DA2D (talk) 22:54, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If PDEs count, the Schrödinger equation and the Dirac equation are examples of differential equations in the complex domain. A linear differential equation of the form on the complex vector space can be turned into one on the real vector space . For a very simple example, using the equation can be replaced by
The question whether the complex case is important in physics the way the real case is, is not a maths issue. IMO the Science section is the best choice. I do not see another post that asks the same or even a related question. --Lambiam21:51, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks all. Greglocock, your SHO example is 1-dimensional but of course you can have a periodic oscillator (such as a planetary orbit) in any orientation in space, you can have damped or forced harmonic oscillators, etc. Those are all described by the same matrix equation. The periodic case means that the matrix eigenvalues are purely imaginary. The damped and forced cases are where there is a real part that is negative or positive respectively. Abductive, of course plenty of science questions (say about how to calculate an electron's trajectory using Maxwell's equations) will have mathematical answers, and the science desk is clearly still the right place for them, as they are things you would study in science class rather than math class. Lambiam, thanks, yes, PDE's are fine, and of course quantum mechanics uses complex PDE's. What I was hoping to see was a situation where you start out with real-valued DEs in some complicated system, and then through some coupling or something, you end up with complex-valued DEs due to real matrices having complex eigenvalues. Also I think the Minkowski metric can be treated like the Euclidean one where the time coordinate is imaginary. But I don't know how this really works, and Wikipedia's articles about such topics always make me first want to go learn more math (Lie algebras in this case). Maybe someday. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:DA2D (talk) 07:25, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our mast radiator article describes a device called a "top hat" which increases the range for mast radiators that can't be built tall enough.
So, why would you bother building a mast radiator without a top hat? Couldn't you just build it shorter with the top hat, and save steel? Marnanel (talk) 15:00, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The main source cited in our article states, "Top loading is less desirable than increased tower height but is useful where towers must be electrically short due to either extremely low carrier frequencies or to aeronautical limitations. Top loading increases the base resistance and lowers the capacitive base reactance, thus reducing the Q and improving the bandwidth of towers less than 90° high."[4] If "reducing the Q" is an undesirable effect, this is a trade-off design issue in which height seems to be favoured if circumstances permit. --Lambiam21:41, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Let's say [citation needed] to that claim. The star is indeed called Sol if you're speaking Latin, but in English it's the Sun (or sun). Of course words like "solar" and "solstice" derive from the Latin name, but using "Sol" to mean "the Sun" does seem to be something from science fiction. --142.112.149.206 (talk) 06:04, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Sol" is occasionally used to mean the Sun by astronomers. I feel like it is used in contexts where it is necessary to distinguish our experience with the Sun here on Earth, such as sunsets, from more "sterile" aspects of the Sun one might experience off the Earth. Abductive (reasoning)08:56, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Using Sol, Terra and Luna to refer to the Sun, Earth and Moon only happens if you write your entire article in Latin and in science fiction, not in regular science articles. They are capitalised though. Just as people write about a galaxy (one of many) or the Galaxy (the Milky Way Galaxy, that's our galaxy). The Solar System is also capitalised. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:38, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article says "Sol" is the "personification" of the sun. Google Image the term "old Sol" and you'll see plenty of images of the sun with a face, not just Sci-Fi stuff. And "Luna" is obviously the basis for a number of words not connected with Sci-Fi. Lunar orbit, lunar module, etc. And the term "terra firma" has often been used in everyday usage. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 11:34, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And yet, if you ask 1,000 people "What's that big yellow thing up in the sky called?", you'll get 1,000 "the Sun"s and zero "Sol"s. Yes, in specialised contexts, Sol is used; but that doesn't justify saying our solar system's star "is called Sol" without any qualification, as if that were the normal, default term. It's not. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]12:16, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And after you've gotten that response, ask them why it isn't the "Sunner System". And why a sun room attached to a house isn't called a "sunarium". And why those energy-gathering plates on some roofs are not called "sunner panels". ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 14:22, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What does that have to do with anything? The question was 'Is our star system officially called "Sol"?' (my emphasis). The answer is it is not. And that does not preclude other terms being derived from Latin sol (or, often enough, from Greek helios), nobody denies that, it is irrelevant to the question. --Wrongfilter (talk) 14:52, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that the OP's question contains false premises. One is the question of what the "official" name is. There is no "official" name. It's the "conventional" name. And the second part, claiming that "Sol" comes from Sci-fi, is demonstrably false. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 15:05, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Then demonstrate (that the usage of "Sol" as a name for the Sun, in English, not its use to derive adjectives, originated outside of SF), with references. The original question does not even include any premises, with maybe the exception of "ubiquitous". --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:18, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Is our star system officially called "Sol" [answer: NO], or is that just something that came from science fiction [answer: NO] and then became ubiquitous? [whatever that means]". And the wording of your own question, just above, does not make sense. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 15:24, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course, but that's not surprising, is it? 15th century humanists, astrologers and pre-Victorian poets liked to sprinkle their texts with Latin words. But I don't think this is what the question is about. It's a matter of context, but it should be up to OP to clarify that. --Wrongfilter (talk) 08:48, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's not surprising, but the discussion was not whether the use of Sol in English texts is surprising, but whether it originated outside of SF. --Lambiam10:52, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my view, the question has a clear scifi bent, and that particular usage ("Where shall we go for our vacation? Alpha Centauri or Sol?") does not originate in the 15th century. The word is much older, of course it is, but the usage is not. In the 15th century people didn't even know that the Sun is just an ordinary star and could do with a particular name to distinguish it from the others. The connotations of sol were vastly different from what they are today and from what is implied in OP's question. Incidentally, the IAU doesn't even define a name [7], although they recommend using capitalised "Sun". Certainly no "Sol" anywhere. --Wrongfilter (talk) 12:04, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why there are no mountains on Earth with a height above 10,000 m? As the death zone is about at 8,000 m, and above 19,000 m, there is an Armstrong limit, where water boils at normal human body temperature, it is good that there are no more mountains higher than 8,000 km than just 14, but if there were hundreds of mountains above 9,000 m, then these were bad to climb. If there were different limits for death zone and Armstrong limit, would then there be possible to have higher mountains? I have just thought that, it is not a homework? --40bus (talk) 22:29, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Multiple sources from web searching suggest the theoretical maximum height for mountains on Earth is around 15,000 m – the limiting factor is Isostasy; the higher (therefore more voluminous) a mountain is, the more its weight causes the crust beneath it to sink. The actual heights of mountains are a trade-off between how fast tectonic movements can raise them versus isostatic sinking and how quickly they are eroded, and tectonic movements do not last for ever. See also Orogeny. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 00:25, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And erosion goes faster as the mountain gets higher, in particular when it's high enough to support glaciers – one reason why mountains can get higher on an airless world. Now it gets interesting for a mountain high enough to reach into the stratosphere, as it would be too dry to have anything but bare rock. I suppose it would locally raise the tropopause, preventing that. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:13, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, DNA replication is not perfect, although proofreading reduces the error rate to about 1 mistake per 109 nucleotides (see our article on DNA Replication). But that is per generation of cells, not of the whole organisms. Many mutations will be neutral in effect (because much of our DNA is redundant), some will be deleterious, and a few might be advantageous. It is the process of natural selection that hinders the spread of deleterious mutations: sometimes this aspect is called purifying selection. One thus usually expects a stable mutation–selection balance over time rather than that "DNA becomes weaker with each generation". Medical science is reducing the selection pressure against some mutations, which consequently may become more common. One of the problems for asexual organisms is referred to as Muller's ratchet; assuming that reverse mutations are rare, each generation has at least the mutational load of its predecessor. In contrast, in sexual organisms genetic recombination generates the variation that, combined with selection, can repair the situation. Sexual organisms consequently have a lighter genetic load. JMCHutchinson (talk) 22:42, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The larger the degree of inbreeding, the larger the chance that deleterious traits are expressed. But this very expression of traits leading to decreased biological fitness of their bearers is what actually enables purifying selection in the longer term. --Lambiam23:36, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Inbred offspring of species that normally outcross may show abnormalities because they are more likely than outcrossed offspring to be homozygous for recessive alleles that are deleterious. In individuals that are heterozygous at these loci, the recessive alleles will not be expressed (because the other wild-type dominant allele is sufficient to do their job adequately). See our article on inbreeding depression. JMCHutchinson (talk) 19:26, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[The larvae] leave the body in an orderly fashion, following each other in a neat procession that always heads south. South-east or south-west sometimes, but never north. No-one knows why.
The author has done considerable international research on the science of forensic identification of decayed bodies and I assume his details can be trusted.
I've looked online for any verification of this surprising statement, but found only this, which seems to debunk it.
Does Beckett state this in his own auctorial voice (i.e. as an omniscient narrator)? If so, he might be genuinely mistaken.
The book was published nearly 20 years ago, what was the accepted wisdom then?
What specific species (if any) is the book describing? – your linked Quora discussion refers only to "maggots" (which can be of numerous species and are a kind of larva, but there are many others, including for example Processionary caterpillars).
Alternatively, if the statement is made by a character in the book, is that character meant to be infallible, or is he portrayed as less than omniscient, or an 'unreliable narrator'?
Regarding the statement, in the Northern hemisphere the arc of South-east to South-west is predominently where the Sun is found well above the horizon, the North never, so the larvae involved might simply be seeking maximum warmth or light. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 02:18, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This appears in the very first paragraph of Chapter I, which starts out:
A human body starts to decompose four minutes after death. Once the encapsulation of life, it now undergoes its final metamorphoses. It begins to digest itself. Cells dissolve from the inside out. Tissue turns to liquid, then to gas. No longer animate, the body becomes an immovable feast for other organisms. Bacteria first, then insects. Flies. Eggs are laid, then hatched. The larvae feed on the nutrient-rich broth, and then migrate. They leave the body in an orderly fashion ... (then the quote above completes the paragraph).
It's not until para 2 that he starts talking about any human characters, and not until para 4 that he invokes the first person.
That's as much as I know. But I find it hard to believe he'd just make up a detail and put it in such a prominent place if it could so easily be debunked if it were not true. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]02:39, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Could it be that the larvae are setting off in search of another corpse? The prevailing wind in the UK is from the south-west, so by heading into the wind they won't be distracted by the frangrance of the one they've just left. Shantavira|feed me09:30, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you can, have a look at 'Heinrich, Bernd. “Coordinated Mass Movements of Blow Fly Larvae (Diptera: Calliphoridae).” Northeastern Naturalist, vol. 20, no. 4, 2013, pp. N23–27. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43288173.' Here are some extracts
On the fourth day, after a cooling night with dew on the grass, a stream of tens of thousands of larvae exited from beneath the carcass within 1 h after sunrise, and proceeded in a single 1-2-cm-wide column directly toward the rising sun...
However, in this case, the larvae left at night, within 1 h after a cloudburst (at 21 :00 hours). But, unlike before, this nocturnal larval exodus in the rain was diffuse; thousands of larvae spread out in virtually all directions over an 8 m2area. Apparently, the sudden moisture had cued and facilitated the mass exodus, but the absence of sun had prevented a unidirectional, en masse movement.
However, on the following morning as the sun was starting to illuminate the carcass on the dewy grass, masses of larvae gathered at the east end of the carcass at 07:00 hours. In one half hour later, they started streaming in a column directly (within one degree) toward the rising sun, and the carcass was then nearly vacated.
It goes on. Maggot migration appears to be a bit more complicated than the novel suggests. Sean.hoyland (talk) 09:39, 20 December 2024 (UTC)
I suppose you could try to address it from the other direction and look at the technology your average maggot has access to in terms of light detection, heat detection, olfactory systems, orientation in magnetic fields (like many arthropods) etc. They presumably have quite a lot of tools. Sean.hoyland (talk) 10:13, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Obviously, Jack, you need to create a corpse, place it in a nearby forest, and carefully observe which way the maggots go. For Science! And Literary Criticism! {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 21:01, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How is it that despite December 21st supposedly being the shortest day of the year, sunrise here happens later and later until December 26 and only on January 05 starts to turn around to occur earlier and earlier. On December 25 it takes place at about 08:44, between December 26 and January 04 it takes place at about 08:45, and on January 05 it takes place again at about 08:44. (Google rounds out the seconds). Is it Google's fault? Is it everywhere the same? Confused in Brussels, Belgium. 178.51.16.158 (talk) 12:06, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also note that sunset begins to be later on 22 December so that the time between sunrise and sunset is a few seconds longer than on 21 December (3 seconds longer on 22/12/24 in Brussels according to this). Alansplodge (talk) 13:33, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also see Equation of time#Major components. The obliquity of the ecliptic (that is, the Earth's axial tilt) is the main component and hardest to understand. But the idea is that the time when the Sun is exactly south (that is, the true noon) moves some minutes back and forth throughout the year and it moves quite rapidly to later times in late December. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:05, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There were nautical miles in use before there were kilometers.
There were US dollars in use before there were Euros.
Yes.
The questions all reduce to Why can't millions of people make a change of historically widely accepted units that continue to serve their purpose, and convert to different units that would have no substantive difference, because someone has an opinion. Philvoids (talk) 00:52, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do any people use metric units in marine and air navigation like "The ship is 10 kilometers from the port", "The plane is 10 kilometers from the destination? And is there any European country with metric flight levels? --40bus (talk) 07:22, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Inland shipping (rivers, canals and lakes) in Europe (except the UK) is fully metric. Ships going for example Tilbury – Duisburg may have to switch units along the way. Gliders and ultralight aircraft in Europe often use metric instruments and airport dimensions are also metric (including runway length). Countries are free to define their territorial waters in whatever way they deem fit, so with nautical miles having no legal status in a fully metric country, they may define their territorial waters as extending 22224 metres. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:23, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our nautical mile article says: "In 1929 the international nautical mile was defined by the First International Extraordinary Hydrographic Conference in Monaco as exactly 1,852 metres (which is 6,076.12 ft). The United States did not adopt the international nautical mile until 1954. Britain adopted it in 1970..."
The US dollar has been the world's dominant reserve currency for about 75 years. As for the metric system in the US, it is standard in scientific, medical, electronics, auto manufacturing and other highly technical industries. By law, all packaged foods and beverages have metric quantities as well as customary quantities. See Metrication in the United States. Cullen328 (talk) 02:28, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the Mersenne number 2^p-1 is prime, then must it be the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod p? (i.e. there is no prime q < p such that 2^q-1 is also a Mersenne prime == 1 mod p) If p is prime (no matter 2^p-1 is prime or not), 2^p-1 is always == 1 mod p. However, there are primes p such that there is a prime q < p such that 2^q-1 is also a Mersenne prime == 1 mod p:
but for these primes p, 2^p-1 is not prime, and my question is: Is there a prime p such that 2^p-1 is a prime and there is a prime q < p such that 2^q-1 is also a Mersenne prime == 1 mod p?
If 2^11-1 is prime, then this is true, since 2^11-1 is == 1 mod 31 and 2^31-1 is prime, but 2^11-1 is not prime
If 2^23-1 or 2^67-1 is prime, then this is true, since 2^23-1 and 2^67-1 are == 1 mod 89 and 2^89-1 is prime, but 2^23-1 and 2^67-1 are not primes
If 2^29-1 or 2^43-1 or 2^71-1 or 2^113-1 is prime, then this is true, since 2^29-1 and 2^43-1 and 2^71-1 and 2^113-1 are == 1 mod 127 and 2^127-1 is prime, but 2^29-1 and 2^43-1 and 2^71-1 and 2^113-1 are not primes
If 2^191-1 or 2^571-1 or 2^761-1 or 2^1901-1 is prime, then this is true, since 2^191-1 and 2^571-1 and 2^761-1 and 2^1901-1 are == 1 mod 2281 and 2^2281-1 is prime, but 2^191-1 and 2^571-1 and 2^761-1 and 2^1901-1 are not primes
If 2^1609-1 is prime, then this is true, since 2^1609-1 is == 1 mod 3217 and 2^3217-1 is prime, but 2^1609-1 is not prime
Neither question is easy. For the first, relations would imply that the integer 2 is not a primitive root mod p, and that its order divides for the prime q. This is a sufficiently infrequent occurrence that it seems likely that all Mersenne numbers could be ruled out statistically, but not enough is known about their distribution. For the second, it is not even known if there are infinitely many Mersenne primes. Tito Omburo (talk) 19:23, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I found that: 2^9689-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 29, 2^44497-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 37, 2^756839-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 47, 2^57885161-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 59, 2^4423-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 67, 2^9941-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 71, 2^3217-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 97, 2^21701-1 is the smallest Mersenne prime == 1 mod 101, and none of the 52 known Mersenne primes are == 1 mod these primes p < 1024: 79, 83, 103, 173, 193, 197, 199, 227, 239, 277, 307, 313, 317, 349, 359, 367, 373, 383, 389, 409, 419, 431, 443, 461, 463, 467, 479, 487, 503, 509, 523, 547, 563, 587, 599, 613, 647, 653, 659, 661, 677, 709, 727, 733, 739, 743, 751, 757, 769, 773, 797, 809, 821, 823, 827, 829, 839, 853, 857, 859, 863, 887, 907, 911, 919, 929, 937, 941, 947, 971, 977, 983, 991, 1013, 1019, 1021 220.132.216.52 (talk) 20:51, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
but none of these primes p has 2^p-1 is known to be prime, the status of 2^(2^89-1)-1 and 2^(2^107-1)-1 are still unknown (see double Mersenne number), but if at least one of them is prime, then will disprove this conjecture (none of the 52 known Mersenne primes are == 1 mod 2^61-1 or 2^127-1), I think that this conjecture may be as hard as the New Mersenne conjecture. 220.132.216.52 (talk) 20:55, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also, for the primes p < 10000, there is a prime q < p such that 2^q-1 is also a Mersenne prime == 1 mod p only for p = 73, 151, 257, 331, 337, 353, 397, 683, 1321, 1613, 2113, 2731, 4289, 4561, 5113, 5419, 6361, 8191, 9649 (this sequence is not in OEIS), however, none of these primes p have 2^p-1 prime. 220.132.216.52 (talk) 02:23, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Conjecture. Every prime number can be written in one of the three forms and
If true, it implies no natural prime is a prime in the ring .
The absolute-value bars are not necessary. A number that can be written in the form is also expressible in the form
It turns out (experimentally; no proof) that a number that can be written in two of these forms can also be written in the third form. The conjecture is not strongly related to the concept of primality, as can be seen in this reformulation:
Conjecture. A natural number that cannot be written in any one of the three forms and is composite.
The first few numbers that cannot be written in any one of these three forms are
They are indeed all composite, but why this should be so is a mystery to me. What do and which appear later in the list, have in common? I see no pattern.
if it has a prime factor congruent to that is raised to an odd power (equivalently, .)
if it has a prime factor congruent to that is raised to an odd power
if it has a prime factor congruent to that is raised to an odd power
It is easy to see why expressibility as any two of these forms leads to the third form holding, and also we can see why it's difficult to see a pattern in numbers that are expressible in none of these forms, in particular we get somewhat-convoluted requirements on exponents of primes in the factorization satisfying congruences modulo 8. GalacticShoe (talk) 06:17, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Assume p is 3 mod 4. Suppose that (2|p)=1. Then where . Because the cyclotomic ideal has norm and is stable under the Galois action it is generated by a single element , of norm .
So I guess that must mean that the product measure, meaning you fix some identification between and and then say a set has measure 1 if measure 1 many of its vertical sections have measure 1, must not be normal. (Unless it's somehow just equal to but I don't think it is.)
But is there some direct way to see that? Say, a continuous function with such that the set of fixed points of is not in the ultrafilter no singleton has a preimage under that's in the ultrafilter? I haven't been able to come up with it. --Trovatore (talk) 06:01, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I recently completed a calculus term, in which one of the last units involving how much one aspect of an object was changing in relation to time at a certain point, given the rate of change of another aspect. Many specific questions could be analyzed as a right triangle with one leg (the x) remaining constant and the other leg (the y) growing at a specified rate. When it came time to solve for the value of the dz/dt (the rate of the hypotenuse’s growth with respect to time) at a certain point, it ended up as less than the provided dy/dt. Here’s an illustration:
The x is the distance from me to a tower. This remains constant.
The y is the distance from the tower to a flying bird.
The dy/dt is the speed at which the bird is flying from the tower.
The z is my distance from the bird.
In this illustration, the distance between me and the bird is increasing at a slower rate than the speed at which the bird itself is flying. What is the cause of this paradox? Primal Groudon (talk) 19:43, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If the bird is between you and the tower (0 ≤ y < x), the distance between you and the bird is even decreasing: dz/dt < 0. By the time it flies right overhead (y = x), the distance is momentarily stationary: dz/dt = 0. After that, it increases: dz/dt > 0. This rate of increase will asymptotically approach dy/dt from below as the bird flies off into an infinite distance. --Lambiam00:34, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think the issue here is that even though the rate of change of z is less than the rate of change of y, z never actually becomes less than y. You can see this graphically, for example, by comparing the graphs of y=x and y=√(x2+1). The second graph is always above the first graph, but the slope of the first graph is x/√(x2+1), which is always less than 1, the slope of the first graph. But this is typical behavior when a graph has an asymptote. As a simpler example, the slope of 1/x is negative, but the value never goes below 0 (at least for x>0). Similarly, the slope of x+1/x is always less than 1, but the value of x+1/x is always greater than x (again, for x>0). The graph of y=√(x2+1) is one branch of a hyperbola having y=x as an asymptote, and this looks very much like the x>0 part of y=x+1/x. In general the difference in rates of change can imply that that two quantities get closer and closer to each other, but this does not mean they ever become equal. This phenomenon is, perhaps, counterintuitive for many people, but the math says it can happen anyway. I don't know if this rises to the level of a paradox, but I can see that it might be concerning for some. --RDBury (talk) 09:39, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For x > 0, the graph of y=√(x2+1) looks even more like that of y=x+1/(2x). For example, when x = 5, √(x2+1) = √26 ≈ 5.09902 is approximated much more closely by 5.1 than by 5.2. --Lambiam18:35, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
When asked "WHO IS YOUR X?" (X still being unknown to me but is known to the respondents), here are the answers I get:
A answers: "A"
B answers: "C"
C answers: "C"
D answers: "F"
E answers: "F"
F answers: "F"
To sum up, the special phenomenon here is that, everybody has their own X (usually), and if any respondent points at another respondent as the first respondent's X, then the other respondent must point at themself as their X.
I wonder who the unknown X may be, when I only know that X is a natural example from everyday life. I thought about a couple of examples, but none of them are satisfactory, as follows:
X is the leader of one's political party, or X is one's mayor, and the like, but all of these examples attribute some kind of leadership or superiority to X, whereas I'm not interested in this kind of solution - involving any superiority of X.
Here is a second solution I thought about: X is the first (or last) person born in the year/month the respondent was born, and the like. But this solution involves some kind of order (in which there is a "first person" and a "last person"), whereas I'm not interested in this kind of solution - involving any order.
Head of household comes to mind as a fairly natural one. The colours then correspond to different households which can be just one person. One objection is that "head of household" is a fairy traditional concept. With marriage equality now being the norm it's perhaps outdated. --2A04:4A43:909F:F9FF:397E:BBF9:E80B:CB36 (talk) 15:11, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Resolved or not, let's try to analyze this mathematically. Given is some set and some function For the example, with
Knowing that "everybody has their own X (usually)", we can normalize the unusual situation that function might not be total in two ways. The first is to restrict the set to the domain of that is, the set of elements on which is defined. This is possible because of the condition that implies so this does not introduce an undue limitation of the range of The second approach is to postulate that whenever might otherwise be undefined. Which of these two approaches is chosen makes no essential difference.
Clearly, if we have We know, conversely, that implies
Let us also consider the inverse image of , given by:
Suppose that This means that there exists some which in turns means that But then we know that Combining this, we have,
The inverse-image function restricted to to which we assign the typing
now induces a partitioning of into non-empty, mutually disjoint subsets, which means they are the classes of an equivalence relation. Each class has its own unique representative, which is the single element of the class that is also a member of . The equivalence relation can be expressed formally by
Applying this to the original example, and the equivalence classes are:
with representative
with representative and
with representative
Conversely, any partitioning of a set defines an equivalence relation; together with the selection of a representative for each equivalence class, this gives an instance of the situation defined in the question. --Lambiam20:47, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, the number of such objects on a set of size n is given by OEIS: A000248, and that page has a number of other combinatorial interpretations. If you ignore the selection of a representative for each class, you get the Bell numbers. --RDBury (talk) 00:35, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Give a base b and two base b digits x and z (x is not 0, z is coprime to b), must there be a base b digits y such that the 3-digit number xyz in base b is prime? 1.165.207.39 (talk) 02:10, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
also offers a counterexample. While there are many counterexamples for most odd bases, I did not find any for even bases. --Lambiam09:58, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One common saying in incel subcultures is that women are "programmed" to only have relationships with the 20% top men. This appears to be consistent (o at least not contradicted by) this phrase in the polygamy article: "More recent genetic data has clarified that, in most regions throughout history, a smaller proportion of men contributed to human genetic history compared to women."
Then again, while I've heard of modern tribes with weird marriage practices (for example the Wodaabe or the Trobriand people) I've never heard of tribes where 70% of men die virgins. Is there any tribe/society where something like that happens? (I realize that modern tribes are by definition different to Paleolithic tribes)90.77.114.87 (talk) 13:51, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From what I've read in the past, it seems that hunter-gatherer cultures over the last 50,000 years ago probably tended to be mildly polygynous -- that is, certain men, due to their personalities and demonstrated skills, managed to attract more than one woman at a time into a relationship with them. (Usually a small number -- some men having large numbers of wives is associated more with agricultural civilizations, and women there could often have less freedom of choice than women in hunter-gatherer groups.) Everybody of both sexes is likely to be most attracted to high-status individuals, but under hunter-gatherer conditions, women also need help with child-rearing, which factors into their mating strategies. AnonMoos (talk) 14:19, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. Under the classic anthropological band-tribe-chiefdom-state classification system (on Wikipedia, covered in the vaguely named Sociopolitical typology article), most historical hunter-gatherer cultures were "bands", while the Wodaabe and Trobriand people sound more like "tribes". AnonMoos (talk) 14:26, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It has been said (in mammals at least) that each 5% difference in mass for males means that their harem (zoology) has one more female. The sexual dimorphism#Humans article says that human males are 15% heavier that the females (previously I had heard 20%), suggesting that the harem-holder has three mates (or 4, if the 20% is correct). But this does not mean that 75% of human males never had sex. Firstly, holding a harem is a dangerous, short term job if other animals are any guide, with the harem master regularly killed or overthrown. Secondly, in current polygynous human cultures and in polygynous animals, there is a huge amount of cheating. Evidence from animals shows that when females cheat, they are statistically more likely to produce offspring from that mating than from a mating with their main male. Abductive (reasoning)11:09, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's doubtful that there were commonly "harems" at any stage of human evolution which is very relevant to modern human behavior. Gorillas have moderate harems of often around 3 or 4 females (as opposed to elephant seals, which commonly have a harem size in the thirties). Robust Australopithecines may have been similar, but modern humans are not descended from them. What we know about attested hunter-gatherer societies strongly suggests that during the last 50,000 years or so (since Behavioral modernity) the majority of men who had wives had one wife, but some exceptional men were able to attract 2 or 3 women at a time into relationships. Men having large numbers of wives (real harems) wasn't too feasible until the rise of social stratification which occurred with the development of agriculture. AnonMoos (talk) 16:50, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you click on the source for Frederick G. Berry in the 1886 election, then on Scattering on the following page, it says it's for those with "No Party Affiliation". Clarityfiend (talk) 14:44, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Piggly Wiggly says the Piggly Wiggly chain and quotes the Harvard Business Review
Both articles agree it was in 1937 in Oklaholma. I believe that Humpty Dumpty is more likely, but some high quality sources would be useful. TSventon (talk) 11:55, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to be a matter of some dispute, but Guide to the Telescoping Shopping Cart Collection, 1946-1983, 2000 by the Smithsonian Institution has the complex details of the dispute between Sylvan Goldman [of Humpty Dumpty] and Orla Watson. No mention of Piggly Wiggly, but our article on Watson notes that in 1946, he donated the first models of his cart to 10 grocery stores in Kansas City.
Absolutely. I remember that the power lift arrangement mentioned in the Smithsonian's link was still an object of analysis for would-be inventors in the mid-sixties, and possibly later, even though the soon to be ubiquituous checkout counter conveyor belt was very much ready making it unnecessary. Couldn't help curiously but think about those when learning about Bredt's rule at school later, see my user page, but it's true "Bredt" sounded rather like "Bread" in my imagination. --Askedonty (talk) 15:33, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
On Newspapers.com (pay site), I'm seeing shopping carts referenced in Portland, Oregon in 1935 or earlier, and occasionally illustrated, at a store called the Public Market; and as far as the term itself is concerned, it goes back to at least the 1850s. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 15:18, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But perhaps referring to a cart brought by the shopper to carry goods home with, rather than one provided by the storekeeper for use in-store? Alansplodge (talk) 16:14, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@Alansplodge, Askedonty, and Baseball Bugs: thank you for your help, it seems that the Harvard Business Review is mistaken and the Piggly Wiggly chain did not introduce the first shopping baskets, which answers my question. The shopping cart article references a paper by Catherine Grandclément, which shows that several companies were selling early shopping carts in 1937, so crediting Sylvan Goldman alone is not the whole story. TSventon (talk) 17:22, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At 53:20 in Dunkirk (1958 film), British soldiers talk about [paraphrasing] 'flowers on the way into Belgium, raspberries on the way out', and specifically reference lilacs. I imagine this was very clear to 1958 audiences, but what is the significance of lilacs? Is it/was it a symbol of Belgium? Valereee (talk) 21:40, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are contemporary reports of the streets being strewn with lilac blossom. See here "Today the troops crossed the frontier along roads strewn with flowers. Belgian girls, wildly enthusiastic, plucked lilac from the wayside and scattered it along the road to be torn and twisted by the mighty wheels of the mechanised forces." DuncanHill (talk) 22:26, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If my understanding is correct, the following numbers are valid at present: (a) number of Senators = 100; (b) number of Representatives = 435; (c) number of electors in the Electoral College = 538. If the USA were to add a new state, what would happen to these numbers? Thank you. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 06:30, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thus, to answer the final question, the minimum number of Electors would be 3… more if the new state has more Representatives (based on population). Blueboar (talk) 13:54, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the short term, there would be extra people in congress. The 86th United States Congress had 437 representatives, because Alaska and Hawaii were granted one upon entry regardless of the apportionment rules. Things were smoothed down to 435 at the next census, two congresses later. --Golbez (talk) 14:58, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. Hmmmmmmmmmmm. Let me re-phrase my question. (a) The number of Senators is always 2 per State, correct? (b) The number of Representatives is what? Is it "capped" at 435 ... or does it increase a little bit? (c) The number of Electors (per State) is simply a function of "a" + "b" (per State), correct? Thanks. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 21:12, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As I understand it, it is indeed capped at 435, though Golbez brings up a point I hadn't taken into account -- apparently it can go up temporarily when states are added, until the next reapportionment. --Trovatore (talk) 21:21, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suggest that (b) would probably depend on whether the hypothetical new state was made up of territory previously part of one or more existing states, or territory not previously part of any existing state. And I suspect that the eventual result would not depend on any pre-calculable formula, but on cut-throat horsetrading between the two main parties and other interested bodies. {The poster formerly nown as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.211.243 (talk) 21:21, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, one other refinement. The formula you've given for number of electors is correct, for states. But it leaves out the District of Columbia, which gets as many electors as it would get if it were a state, but never lessmore than those apportioned to the smallest state. In practice that means DC gets three electors. That's why the total is 538 instead of 535. --Trovatore (talk) 21:58, 12 December 2024 (UTC) Oops; I remembered the bit about the smallest state wrong. It's actually never more than the smallest state. Doesn't matter in practice; still works out to 3 electors for the foreseeable future, either way, because DC would get 3 electors if it were a state, and the least populous state gets 3. --Trovatore (talk) 23:23, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
in news report "On Tuesday, the price for Arabica beans, which account for most global production, topped $3.44 a pound (0.45kg), having jumped more than 80% this year. " [8] how do they measure it? some other report mention it is a commodity price set for trading like gold silver etc. what is the original data source for this report? i checked a few other news stories and did not find any clarification about this point, they just know something that i don't. thank you in advance for your help. Gryllida (talk, e-mail) 01:32, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Gryllida, they seem to be talking about the "Coffee C" contract in the List of traded commodities. The price seems to have peaked and then fallen a day later
Hi friends. The article for Ramsey Abbey in the UK refers to an "order of precedence for abbots in Parliament". (Sourced to an encyclopedia, which uses the wording "The abbot had a seat in Parliament and ranked next after Glastonbury and St. Alban's"). Did a ranking/order of precedence exist and if yes where can it be found? Presumably this would predate the dissolution of monasteries in england. Thanks.70.67.193.176 (talk) 06:49, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The abbots called to parliament were called "Mitred Abbots" although not all were entitled to wear a mitre. Our Mitre article has much the same information as you quote, and I suspect the same citations. The only other reference I could find, also from an encyclopedia;
Of the abbots, the abbot of Glastonbury had the precedence till A.D. 1154, when Pope Adrian IV, an Englishman, from the affection he entertained for the place of his education, assigned this precedence to the abbot of St. Alban's. In consequence, Glastonbury ranked next after him, and Reading had the third place.
I'm wondering if there has been analysis of this. The US government gets the tariff money(?) and biggest chunk will be on manufactured goods from China. Those in turn are primarily consumer goods, which means that the tariff is something like a sales tax, a type of tax well known to be regressive. Obviously there are leaks in the description above, so one would have to crunch a bunch of numbers to find out for sure. But that's what economists do, right? Has anyone weighed in on this issue? Thanks. 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:327E (talk) 08:58, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, I'll see what I can find. Do you remember if the revenue collected is supposed to be enough for the government to care about? I.e. enough to supposedly offset the inevitable tax cuts for people like Elon Musk? 2601:644:8581:75B0:0:0:0:327E (talk) 22:36, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Import duties are extremely recessive in that (a) they are charged at the same rate for any given level of income; and (b) those with less income tend to purchase far more imported goods than those with more income (define “more” and “less” any way you wish). Fiscally, they border on insignificant, running an average of 1.4% of federal revenue since 1962 (or, 0.2% of GDP), compared to 47.1% (8.0%) for individual income tax and 9.9% (1.7%) for corporate tax receipts.DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 22:52, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Curious about your point (b); why would this be? It seems to me that as my income has risen I have probably bought more stuff from abroad, at least directly. It could well be that I've bought less indirectly, but I'm not sure why that would be. --Trovatore (talk) 00:02, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Trovatore, most daily use items are imported: toothbrushes, combs, kitchenware, shopping bags. Most durable goods are imported: phones, TVs, cars, furniture, sporting goods, clothes. These items are more likely to be imported because it is MUCH cheaper / more profitable to make them abroad. Wander through Target, Sam's Club, or Wal-Mart and you'll be hard pressed to find "Made in America" goods. But, in a hand-crafted shop, where prices have to reflect the cost of living HERE, rather than in Bangladesh, prices soar. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 19:13, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Um, sure, but surely it's a fairly rare person of any income level who spends a significant portion of his/her income on artisanal goods. --Trovatore (talk) 06:03, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
PiusImpavidus, Every income strata (in America) spends far more on services than on goods. Services tend to be more of a repeated purchase: laundry (vs. washing machine), Uber (vs. car), rent (vs. purchase), internet (vs. books), etc. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 19:17, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For Ronald Albert Dunn (Q109827858) I have given names of "Ron. A.", an address in 1958 of 60 Mimosa Road, Carnegie, Victoria, Australia S.E. 9 (he was also in Carnegie in 1948) and an uncited death date of 25 June 1972.
He was an Australian arachnologist with the honorifics AAA AAIS.
I accessed Ancestry.com via the Wikipedia Library, so you should have access. Newspapers.com is also available via the library if you register, which I haven't. An editor with a Newspapers.com account would be able to make a clipping which anyone could access online.
There is a phabricator problem about loading a second page of results. My workaround is to try to add more information to the search to get more relevant results on the first page of results. TSventon (talk) 21:03, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Various maneuverings in the middle ages (including the infamous Fourth Crusade) certainly gave many Byzantines a negative view of western Catholics, so that toward the end some frankly preferred conquest by Muslims to a Christian alliance which would involve Byzantine religious and political subordination to the European West (see discussion at Loukas Notaras). But the Byzantines generally considered themselves to be the real Romans, and called themselves "Romaioi" much more often than they called themselves Greek (of course, "Byzantine" is a later retroactive term). AnonMoos (talk) 17:09, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think these religious schisms had nothing to do with the secular political situation. In 330, before Christianity became an established religion that could experience schisms, Constantine the Great moved the capital of the unitary Roman Empire from Rome to the city of Byzantium and dubbed it the New Rome – later renamed to Constantinople. During the later periods in which the Western and Eastern Roman Empire were administered separately, this was not considered a political split but an expedient way of administering a large polity, of which Constantinople remained the capital. So when the Western wing of the Roman Empire fell to the Ostrogoths and even the later Exarchate of Ravenna disappeared, the Roman Empire, now only administered by the Constantinopolitan court, continued in an unbroken succession from the Roman Kingdom and subsequent Republic. --Lambiam10:48, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Ottoman Turkish, the term روم (Rum), ultimately derived from Latin Roma, was used to designate the Byzantine Empire, or, as a geographic term, its former lands. Fun fact: After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmet the Conqueror and his successors claimed the title of Caesar of Rome, with the Ottoman Empire being the successor of the Byzantine Empire. IMO this claim has merit; Mehmet II was the first ruler of yet another dynasty, but rather than replacing the existing Byzantine administrative apparatus, he simply continued its use for the empire he had become the ruler of. If you recognize the claim, the Republic of Turkey is today's successor of the Roman Kingdom. --Lambiam12:01, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How many foreign presidents are CURRENTLY buried in the USA? (I am aware of previous burials that have since been repatriated)
For example, In Woodlawn Cemetery in Miami, FL, there are two Cuban presidents and a Nicaraguan president.
What would have been the typical extent (in square miles or square kilometers) of an English parish, circa 1800 or so? Let's say the median rather than the mean. With more interest in rural than urban parishes. -- Avocado (talk) 00:05, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There were tensions involved in a unit based on the placement of churches being tasked to administer the poor law; that was why "civil parishes" were split off a little bit later... AnonMoos (talk) 01:11, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Avocado As a start the mean area of a parish in England and Wales in around 1832 seems to have been around 5.6 square miles.
By the early nineteenth century the north-west of England, including the expanding cities of Manchester and Liverpool, had just over 150 parishes, each of them covering an average of almost 12,000 acres, whereas the more rural east of the country had more than 1,600 parishes, each with an average size of approximately 2,000 acres.
On the contrary , in England , which contains 38,500,000 statute acres, the parishes or livings comprehend about 3,850 acres the average; and if similar allowance be made for those livings in cities and towns , perhaps about 4,000.
Oh, that's great info -- ty! I can't seem to get a look at the content of the book. Does it say anything else about other regions? -- Avocado (talk) 23:24, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The OCR book doesn't mention other regions. I have found where the figure of 10,674 came from: page 112 of the 1816 essay has a note that Preliminary Observations ( p . 13. and 15. ) to the Popu-lation Returns in 1811 ; where the Parishes and Parochial Chapelries are stated at 10,674 . The text of page 112 says that churches are contained in be-tween 10 , and 11,000 parishes † ; and probably after a due allowance for consolidations , & c . they constitute the Churches of about 10,000 Parochial Benefices, so the calculation on p.165 of the 1816 essay is based on around 10,000 parishes in England (and Wales) in 1800 (38,500,000 divided by 3,850). TSventon (talk) 01:40, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Parishes, like political constituencies etc, were in theory decided by the number of inhabitants, not the area covered. What the average was at particular points, I don't know. No doubt it rose over recent centuries as the population expanded, but rural parishes generally did not. Johnbod (talk) 03:09, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But whatever the population changes, the parish boundaries in England (whether urban or rural) remained largely fixed between the 12th and mid-19th centuries. Alansplodge (talk) 13:53, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Right, I'm not asking because I thought parish boundaries had been drawn to equalize the geographic area covered or I wanted to know how those boundaries came about. I'm asking because I'm curious what would have been typical in terms of geographic area in order to better understand certain aspects of the society of the time.
For instance, how far (and thus how long) would people have to travel to get to their church? How far might they live from other people who attended the same church? How far would the rector/vicar/curate have to range to attend to his parishioners in their homes?
Fwiw, I'm not really seeing any answers to questions of actual geographic extent in that first chapter, mostly info on the "how they came to be" that, again, isn't really the focus of the question. Or maybe the info I'm looking for is in the pages that are omitted from the preview?
The rest of the book is clearly focused on a much earlier period than I'm interested in (granted, parish boundaries may not have changed much between the start of the Reformation and the Georgian era, but culture, practices, and the relationship of most people to their church and parish certainly would have!) -- Avocado (talk) 16:09, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The chapter is relevant to how far people had to travel in the middle ages, which I can see is not the period you are interested in. TSventon (talk) 21:25, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, it looks to me as if the pages I need are probably among the unavailable ones, then. Oh well. Thank you for the suggestion regardless! -- Avocado (talk) 22:47, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One last link, the introduction of which might be helpful, describing attempts to create new parishes for the growing population in the early 19th century (particularly pp. 19-20):
As early as the early 19th century, in the early days of Reform Judaism, confirmation ceremonies for boys and girls began to be held in which their knowledge of the religion was tested, similar to that practiced among Christians. It spread to the more liberal circles of German Jewry, and by the middle of the century had also begun to be widespread among the Orthodox bourgeoisie. Rabbi Jacob Etlinger of Altona was forced by the community's regulations to participate in such an event in 1867, and published the sermon he had prepared for the purpose later. He emphasized that he was obligated to do so by law, and that Judaism did not recognize that the principles of the religion should be adopted in such a public declaration, since it is binding from birth. However, as part of his attempt to stop the Reform, he supported a kind of parallel procedure that was intended to take place exclusively outside the synagogue.
The idea of confirmation was not always met with resistance, especially with regard to girls: the chief rabbi of the Central Consistory of French Jews, Shlomo Zalman Ullmann, permitted it for both sexes in 1843. In 1844, confirmation for young Jews was held for the first time in Verona, Italy. In the 1880s, Rabbi Zvi Hermann Adler agreed to the widespread introduction of the ceremony, after it had become increasingly common in synagogues, but refused to call it 'confirmation'. In 1901, Rabbi Eliyahu Bechor, cantor in Alexandria, permitted it for both boys and girls, inspired by what was happening in Italy. Other rabbis initially ordered a more conservative event.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the attitude towards the bat mitzvah party was reserved, because it was sometimes an attempt to imitate symbols drawn from the confirmation ceremony, and indeed there were rabbis, such as Rabbi Aharon Volkin, who forbade the custom on the grounds of gentile laws, or who treated it with suspicion, such as Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who in a 1950s recantation forbade holding an event in the synagogue because it was "a matter of authority and a mere vanity...there is no point and no basis for considering it a matter of a mitzvah and a mitzvah meal". The Haredi community also expressed strong opposition to the celebration of the bat mitzvah due to its origins in Reform circles. In 1977, Rabbi Yehuda David Bleich referred to it as one of the "current problems in halakhah", noting that only a minority among the Orthodox celebrate it and that it had spread to them from among the Conservatives.
On the other hand, as early as the beginning of the twentieth century, rabbis began to encourage holding a Bat Mitzvah party for a daughter, similar to a party that is customary for a son, with the aim of strengthening observance of the mitzvot among Jewish women.
What would be the most important feminist victories prior to the 18th and 19th centuries? I'm looking for specific laws or major changes (anywhere in the world), not just minor improvements in women's pursuit of equality. Something on the same scale and importantance as the women's suffrage. DuxCoverture (talk) 11:54, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not aware of any occuring without being foreseable a set of conditions such as the perspective of a minimal equal representation both in the judiciary and law enforcement. Those seem to be dependent on technological progress, maybe particularly law enforcement although the judiciary sometimes heavily relies on recording capabilities. Unfortunately Ancient Egypt is not very explicitly illustrating the genesis of its sociological dynamics. --Askedonty (talk) 16:25, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Before universal male suffrage became the norm in the 19th century, also male commoners did not pull significant political weight, at least in Western society, so any feminist "victories" before then can only have been minor improvements in women's rights in general. --Lambiam22:40, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think many of those were widely, significantly changed prior to the 18th century, though the World is large and diverse, and history is long, so it's difficult to generalise. See Women's rights. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 11:05, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"The film contains numerous historical inaccuracies: It inflates Hypatia's achievements and incorrectly portrays her as finding a proof of Aristarchus of Samos's heliocentric model of the universe, which there is no evidence that Hypatia ever studied." (from our Hypatia article linked above). Alansplodge (talk) 14:59, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Even if true (we have no proof she did not embrace the heliocentric model while developing the theory of gravitation to boot), it did not result in a major change in the position of women. --Lambiam03:22, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The lead of our article states that, in numerous interviews, Griffith made clear that the film was a rebuttal to his critics and he felt that they were, in fact, the intolerant ones. --Lambiam22:26, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Precisely. Griffith thought he was presenting the truth, however unpopular, and that the criticism was meant to stifle his voice, not because the opinions he expressed were wrong but because they were unwelcome. --Lambiam03:14, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a term for the feeling produced when two things are nearly but not quite identical, and you wish they were either fully identical or clearly distinct? I think this would be reminiscent of the narcissism of small differences, but applied to things like design or aesthetics – or like a broader application of the uncanny valley (which is specific to imitation of humans). --71.126.56.235 (talk) 20:19, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why yearbooks are often named after years that they concern? For example, a yearbook that concerns year 2024 and tells statistics about that year might be named 2025 Yearbook, with 2024 Yearbook instead concerning 2023? Which is the reason for that? --40bus (talk) 21:33, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any yearbooks that are named after the same years that they concern, e.g. 2024 yearbook concerning 2024, 2023 yearbook concerning 2023 etc. --40bus (talk) 13:04, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A professional baseball team will typically have a "2024 Yearbook" for the current season, since the entire season occurred in 2024. Though keep in mind that the 2024 yearbook would have come out at the start of the season, hence it actually covers stats from 2023 as well as rosters and schedules for 2024. ←Baseball BugsWhat's up, Doc?carrots→ 14:40, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the UK, the magazine Private Eye releases an annual at the end of every year which is named in this way. It stands out from all the other comic/magazine annuals on the rack which are named after the following year. I worked in bookselling for years and always found this interesting. Turner Street (talk) 11:26, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I once read in a George Will article (or it might have been in one of his short columns) that the University of Chicago or one of its departments used "Everything You Can Do, We Can Do Meta" as a motto, but it turned out this was completely (if unintentionally, at least on Will's part) made up. Does anyone else remember George Will making that claim? Regardless, has anyone any idea how George Will may have mis-heard or mis-remembered it? (I could never believe that he intentionally made it up.) Anyway, does anyone know the source of the phrase, or at least an earliest source. (Obviously it may have occurred to several people independently.) The earliest I've found on Google is a 2007 article in the MIT Technology Review. Anything earlier? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 04:09, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[13] describes it as "John Bell’s motto" and uses the reference J. Bell, ‘Legal Theory in Legal Education – “Everything you can do, I can do meta…”’, in: S. Eng (red.), Proceedings of the 21st IVR World Congress: Lund (Sweden), 12-17 August 2003, Wiesbaden: Frans Steiner Verlag, p. 61.. Polygnotus (talk) 05:51, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In his book I've Been Thinking, Daniel C. Dennett writes: 'Doug Hofstadter and I once had a running disagreement about who first came up with the quip “Anything you can do I can do meta”; I credited him and he credited me.'[14] Dennett credited Hofstadter (writing meta- with a hyphen) in Brainchildren: Essays on Designing Minds (1998).[15] Hofstadter disavowed this claim in I am a Strange Loop, suggesting that the quip was Dennett's brainchild, writing, 'To my surprise, though, this “motto” started making the rounds and people quoted it back to me as if I had really thought it up and really believed it.'[16]
It is, of course, quite possible that this witty variation on Irving Berlin's "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)" was invented independently again and again. In 1979, Arthur Allen Leff wrote, in an article in Duke Law Journal: 'My colleague, Leon Lipson, once described a certain species of legal writing as, “Anything you can do, I can do meta.”'[17] (Quite likely, John Bell (mis)quoted Lipson.) For other, likely independent examples, in 1986, it is used as the title of a technical report stressing the importance of metareasoning in the domain of machine learming (Morik, Katharina. Anything you can do I can do meta. Inst. für Angewandte Informatik, Projektgruppe KIT, 1986), and in 1995 we find this ascribed to cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder.[18] --Lambiam14:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
(ec) He may have been mixing this up with "That's all well and good and practice, but how does it work in theory?" which is associated with the University of Chicago and attributed to Shmuel Weinberger, who is a professor there. Dekimasuよ!14:42, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Did Sir John Hume get entrapped in his own plot (historically)?
In Shakespeare's "First Part of the Contention..." (First Folio: "Henry VI Part 2") there's a character, Sir John Hume, a priest, who manages to entrap the Duchess of Gloucester in the conjuring of a demon, but then gets caught in the plot and is sentenced to be "strangled on the gallows".
My question: Was Sir John Hume, the priest, a historical character? If he was, did he really get caught in the plot he laid for the Duchess, and end up being executed?
Here's what goes on in Shakespeare's play:
In Act 1, Scene 2 [Oxford Shakespeare 1988] Sir John Hume and the Duchess of Gloucester are talking about using Margery Jordan "the cunning witch of Eye" and Roger Bolingbroke, the conjuror, to raise a spirit that will answer the Duchess's questions. It is clear Hume is being paid by the Duke of Suffolk to entrap the Duchess. His own motivation is not political but simple lucre.
In Act 1, Scene 4 the witch Margery Jordan, John Southwell and Sir John Hume, the two priests, and Roger Bolingbroke, the conjuror, conjure a demon (Asnath) in front of the Duchess of Gloucester in order that she may ask him questions about the fate of various people, and they all get caught and arrested by the Duke of York and his men. (Hume works for Suffolk and Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, not for York, so it is not through Hume that York knows of these goings on, but York on his part was keeping a watch on the Duchess)
Act 2, Scene 3 King Henry: (to Margery Jordan, John Southwell, Sir John Hume, and Roger Bolingbroke) "You four, from hence to prison back again; / From thence, unto the place of execution. / The witch in Smithfield shall be burned to ashes, / And you three shall be strangled on the gallows."
John Home or Hume (Home and Hume are pronounced identically) was Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester's confessor. According to this and this "Home, who had been indicted only for having knowledge of the activities of the others, was pardoned and continued in his position as canon of Hereford. He died in 1473." He does not seem to have been Sir John. I'm sure someone who knows more than me will be along soon. DuncanHill (talk) 16:35, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At this period "Sir" (and "Lady") could still be used as a vague title for people of some status, without really implying they had a knighthood. Johnbod (talk) 20:46, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's also an article for a Thomas Southwell (priest). In Shakespeare he is "John Southwell". The name "John Southwell" does appear in the text of the play itself (it is mentioned by Bolingbroke). I haven't checked if the quarto and the folio differ on the name. His dates seem to be consistent with this episode and Roger Bolingbroke does refer to the other priest as "Thomas Southwell". But nothing is mentioned in the article Thomas Southwell (priest) itself, so that article may be about some other priest named Thomas Southwell. In any case Roger Bolingbroke points out that only Roger Bolingbroke and Margery Jourdemayne were executed in connection with this affair. Shakespeare has them all executed. He must have been in a bad mood when he wrote that passage. Either that, or he just wanted to keep things simple. 178.51.16.158 (talk) 11:42, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I saw Mike Johnson on TV a day or two ago. (He was speaking from some official podium ... I believe about the recent government shutdown possibility, the Continuing Resolution, etc.) I was surprised to see that he was wearing a yarmulke. The color of the yarmulke was a close match to the color of Johnson's hair, so I had to look closely and I had to look twice. I said to myself "I never knew that he was Jewish". It bothered me, so I looked him up and -- as expected -- he is not Jewish. Why would he be wearing a yarmulke? Thanks. 32.209.69.24 (talk) 07:40, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Presumably to show his support for Israel and anti-semitism (and make inroads into the traditional Jewish-American support for the Democratic Party). Trump wore one too. Clarityfiend (talk) 10:39, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
[Edited to add – Edit Conflict with Lambiam below.] He may also have just come from, or be shortly going to, some (not necessarily religious) event held in a synagogue, where he would wear it for courtesy. I would do the same, and have my (non-Jewish) grandfather's kippah, which he wore for this purpose not infrequently, having many Jewish friends. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 16:39, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It is somewhat customary, also for male goyim, to don a yarmulke when visiting a synagogue or attending a Jewish celebration or other ceremony, like Biden here while lecturing at a synagogue in Atlanta, Georgia (and under him Trump while groping the Western Wall). Was Johnson speaking at a synagogue? --Lambiam16:38, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This year Hanukkah begins unusually late in the Gregorian calendar, starting at sundown on December 25, when Congress will not be in session. This coincidence can be described by the portmanteau Chrismukkah. So, the Congressional observance of Hanukkah was ahead of schedule this year. Back in 2013, Hanukkah arrived unusually early, during the US holiday of Thanksgiving, resulting in the portmanteau of Thanksgivukkah. Cullen328 (talk) 17:15, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Of interest that other notice Joseph, Marie, Pierre. The hand-written text scribbled on the portrait stands as 'Eveque de Sebastopolis'. Pierre-Joseph Chauveau probably, now is also mentioned as Pierre-Joseph in Voyages ..even though, Lady Amherst's Pheasant is referred, in the same, through an other missionary intermediary: similar. --Askedonty (talk) 23:28, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am writing a rough draft of Delivery After Raid, also known as The London Milkman in my sandbox. I’m still trying to verify basic information, such as the original publication of the photo. It was allegedly first published on October 10, 1940, in Daily Mirror, but it’s behind a paywall in British Newspaper Archive, but from the previews I can see, I don’t know think the photo is there. Does anyone know who originally published it or publicized it, or which British papers carried it in the 1940s? For a photo that’s supposed to be famous, it’s almost impossible to find anything about it before 1998. Viriditas (talk) 04:01, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Somewhat tellingly, this article about this photo in The Times just writes, "On the morning of October 10, 1940, a photograph taken by Fred Morley of Fox Photos was published in a London newspaper." The lack of identification of the newspaper is not due to reluctance of mentioning a competitor, since further on in the article we read, "... the Daily Mirror became the first daily newspaper to carry photographs ...". --Lambiam11:45, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can't join the dots. Doesn't being credited to the photographic archive of Picture Post imply that it might have appeared in Picture Post? How does the agency being Fox Photos negate the possibility? Card Zero (talk)14:21, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It wasn't a Hulton picture, it was a Fox picture. The Hulton Archive absorbed other archives over the years, before being itself absorbed by Getty. DuncanHill (talk) 14:31, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As general context, from my professional experience of picture researching back in the day, photo libraries and agencies quite often tried to claim photos and other illustrations in their collections as their own IP even when they were in fact not their IP and even when they were out of copyright. Often the same illustration was actually available from multiple providers, though obviously (in that pre-digital era) one paid a fee to whichever of them you borrowed a copy from for reproduction in a book or periodical. Attributions in published material may not, therefore, accurately reflect the true origin of an image. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 18:06, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Shakespeare's "Comedy of Errors" (Act 3, Scene 2) Dromio of Syracuse and his master Antipholus of Syracuse discuss Nell the kitchen wench who Dromio says "is spherical, like a globe. I could find out countries in her." After asking about the location of a bunch of countries on Nell (very funny! recommended!), Antipholus ends with: "Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?" Dromio hints "Belgia, the Netherlands" stood in her privates ("O, sir, I did not look so low.") My question is not about how adequate the comparison is but on whether "Belgia" and "the Netherlands" were the same thing, two synonymous designations for the same thing to Shakespeare (the Netherlands being the whole of the Low Countries and Belgia being just a slightly more literate equivalent of the same)? Or were "the Netherlands" already the Northern Low Countries (i.e. modern Netherlands), i.e. the provinces that had seceded about 15 years prior from the Spanish Low Countries (Union of Utrecht) while "Belgia" was the Southern Low Countries (i.e. modern Belgium and Luxembourg), i.e. the provinces that decided to stay with Spain (Union of Arras)? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 13:40, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Essentially they were regarded as the same - you might look at Leo Belgicus, a visual trope invented in 1583, perhaps a decade before the play was written, including both (and more). In Latin at this period and later Belgica Foederata was the United Provinces, Belgica Regia the Southern Netherlands. The Roman province had included both. Johnbod (talk) 15:40, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This general region was originally part of Middle Francia aka Lotharingia, possession of whose multifarious territories have been fought over by themselves, West Francia (roughly, France) and East Francia (roughly, Germany) for most of the last 1,100 years. The status of any particular bit of territory was potentially subject to repeated and abrupt changees due to wars, treaties, dynastic marriages, expected or unexpected inheritances, and even being sold for ready cash. See, for an entertaining (though exhausting as well as exhaustive) account of this, Simon Winder's Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe's Lost Country (2019). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 18:19, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I happened to come across this recent article on sv-WP. The word is also on Urban Dictionary [19] and Wiktionary [20].
Does this word exist in English or other languages? Or something close? Google translate on the sv-WP article suggests "woolling" or "wooling", but I don't know if that's valid. There's some logic in it, I'll say that. Gråbergs Gråa Sång (talk) 07:58, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is there a word for this type of problem. This is an example. A company wants excellent employees. They require that all applicants have a college degree with perfect grades. As a result, all applicants come from paper mill universities where you get a perfect grade just for paying for the course. Instead of getting excellence, the company gets worse employees than before imlpementing the rule that was intended to increase excellence. In general, I'm looking for a shorter way to say: The action you are implementing to get a good outcome will instead bring about the opposite. 12.116.29.106 (talk) 13:12, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In general it could be an example of Goodhart's law or Campbell's law: when you make an indicator into a target, it stops being a useful target. More specifically, it could be an example of educational inflation or "credentialism", where educational degrees or credentials are used as a target that is particularly susceptible to being gamed. --Amble (talk) 17:58, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What are some examples of Italian surnames ending in -i deriving from a notional singular in -io (and excluding -cio, -gio, -glio), like proverbi from proverbio? I know I've seen one or two but I can't recall them. 71.126.56.57 (talk) 04:17, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A few pairs of a noun x-io coexisting with a surname X-i:
Although it is plausible that these surnames actually derive from the corresponding nouns, I don't know whether this is actually the case. Surnames may be subject to modification by the influence of a similar-sounding familiar word. --Lambiam08:12, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I can think of situations where such expressions could be used, as a creative (perhaps journalistic) form of adjective, but it would feel a bit affected to do so: as if the writer was trying to draw attention to their writing. For example, if writing about a Germany v England football match and you knew your audience would understand the reference, you could say the match had a 5–1-win vibe throughout (the reference being this match in 2001). Hassocks5489 (Floreat Hova!)20:04, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In many other languages, a noun is like 5-1-win and an adjective is like 5-1-win-, with prefixed as 5-1-winvibe. And are there any place names written as closed compounds where second part is an independent word, not a suffix, as if South Korea and North Dakota were written as Southkorea and Northdakota respetively? --40bus (talk) 22:34, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand the question. Compound (linguistics) says that if it has a hyphen, it's a hyphenated compound. If it's a closed compound, it doesn't have a hyphen. Do you want a word that can be spelled both ways? Try dumbass and dumb-ass.
Your examples, if compounds, are all open compounds.
There's wild cat, also spelled wild-cat and wildcat. The hyphen may be present because a compound is being tentatively created, giving a historical progression like foot path → foot-path → footpath. Or it may indicate different grammatical usage, like drop out (verb) and drop-out (noun), also dropout. Card Zero (talk)17:58, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Street names used to be, e.g. Smith-street, rather than Smith Street.
Why in English, street name suffixes are not written together with the main part, as in most other Germanic languages? For example, equivalent of Example Street in German is Beispielstraße, in Dutch, Voorbeeldstraat, and in Swedish Exempelgatan, all literally "Examplestreet". And in numbered streets, if names were written together, then 1st Street would be 1st street or with more "Germanic" style, 1. street. In lettered streets, A Street would become A-street. --40bus (talk) 21:54, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not sure. Lots of old place names are closed compounds, for instance the well known ox ford location, Oxford, and I think for the Saxons that included streets, such as Watlingestrate. So it's tempting to say that closed compounds went out of fashion through the influence of Norman French, which is the usual cause of non-Germanic aspects of English, but the Normans would have said rue, and somehow that didn't make it into English - yet they introduced the habit of keeping street a separate word? Maybe? Card Zero (talk)07:06, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'd indeed be curious to know if the different notion of word is due to the fact that whoever applied writing to that specific language decided to write add a space between the elements of the compound term (in English) or to write them together (in German, Swedish, Dutch etc.). One could perhaps argue that filler letters (e.g. an s or e between the different elements of the compound word) is more typical in those languages than in English and therefore these filler letters mean that the combination is still a single word, while English does not have such filler letters except for the genitive s. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 14:51, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In Revised Romanization, are there ever situations where there is same vowel twice in a row? Does Korean have any such hiatuses? Would following made-up words be correct according to Korean phonotactics?
Sure, having the same vowel twice in a row is pretty common. The word 구울 is a real word that means "to be baked": see wikt:굽다. That's not really a question about Revised Romanization, though. --Amble (talk) 19:47, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The initial letter rho of Ancient Greek (which always carried a rough breathing) was transcribed in Latin as 'rh', 'r' for the letter and 'h' for the rough breathing. It was not transcribed 'hr' which would be just as logical.
On the other hand, in the case of a rough breathing before a vowel the Latin 'h' which transcribes the rough breathing preceded the vowel: for example an alpha with a rough breathing would be transcribed in Latin as 'ha' not 'ah'.
How can that inconsistency in the way the rough breathing was transcribed in these two cases in Latin be explained?
Question #2:
There are also cases of 'rh' in Latin which do not transcribe a rho with a rough breathing. There are even cases of medial 'rh' which obviously could never transcribe an initial rho in Greek, for example 'arrha' ('pledge, deposit, down payment').
What are those 'rh'? Do they always occur after 'rr' or 'double r' (as in the example)? Are there 'rr' that are not followed by an 'h'? In other words is this 'h' simply a spelling device indicating some peculiarity of the pronunciation of the 'rr'? Or are 'r' and 'rh' (or possibly 'rr' and 'rrh') two different phonemes in Latin?
A likely explanation for the inconsistency is that when such things were first devised by somebody, they weren't working to already-set rules, and went with the first idea that came to them, which might well have been inconsistent with similar things thought up by someone else, somewhere else, at some other time, that they didn't know about. This is a major difference between the evolutions of 'natural' languages and writing systems, and the creations of conlangs and their scripts (and also 'real' solo-constructed scripts such as Glagolitic).
Similar processes explain a lot of the frankly bonkers nomenclatures used in modern physics, etc., where someone makes up 'placeholder' names intending to replace them with something better, but never gets round to doing so, and others take them up. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 04:43, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
40bus -- Latin alphabet "rh" fit in with other digraphs used when transcribing Greek into Latin, namely "th", "ph", and "ch". The sequence "hr" would only make sense if a rho with a rough breathing meant a sequence of two sounds "h"+"r", which I highly doubt. As for medial doubled -rr-, it also had a rough breathing over one or both rhos in some orthographic practices, which is included in some transcriptions -- i.e. diarrhea -- and ignored in others. By the way, words beginning with upsilon generally had a rough breathing also. AnonMoos (talk) 06:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A simple consistent rule is that the Latin ⟨h⟩ in transliterated Greek words immediately precedes a vowel or, exceptionally, another ⟨h⟩ digraph (as in chthonic and phthisis).
That's most standard. I was looking at Goodwin and Gluck's "Greek Grammar", and it seemed that they had rough breathings over both rhos in an intervocalic doubled rho, but on looking closer, the first one is actually a smooth breathing, as you describe... AnonMoos (talk) 10:44, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
According to Wiktionary, latin arrha is from Greek, originally from Semitic: wikt:arrha#Latin. So it still has to do with how Greek words were borrowed into Latin, not to do with native Latin phonetics. --Amble (talk) 15:35, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Can ordinal numbers in English be abbreviate with full stop, like 4. time (4th time) or 52. floor (52nd floor)? And does English ever abbreviate words with full stop to save space, similarly to many other languages, like in table columns, where e.g. Submitted Proposals -> Subm. Prop. would occur? There are some established full-stop abbreviations like US state abbreviations, but are there any temporary abbreviations which are used only when space is limited. And can full stops be used in dates like 16. December 2024? --40bus (talk) 21:58, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In some situations words are abbreviated with full stops, but in my experience they are never used with numbers in the way you suggest. HiLo48 (talk) 22:36, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In some cases, Romance languages use ª , º abbreviations, but English has a whole series of special two-letter endings for the purpose: -st, -nd, -rd, -th... AnonMoos (talk) 01:07, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In certain contexts a slight re-ordering may result in needing no ordinal indication at all: "Manhole 69", "Track 12", "Coitus 80" (all titles of J. G. Ballard short stories, by the way); "Floor 17", "Level 42", etc. This however might fall outside the scope of your query. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 03:16, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes. 4. stands for "dördüncü", which means fourth in Turkish. This type of abbreviation is commonly used in Turkey, maybe through the influence of German. Xuxl (talk) 15:01, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any words in English where yod-coalescense appears with a stressed vowel?
Are ranges of times in English-speaking countries ever presented as: 7-21, 12-18, with 24-hour clock? Would most English speakers understand "7-21" to be a range of clock times?
Why does English not say "Clock is five", but "It is five"? In most other Germanic languages, as well as in some Uralic languages, word "clock" appears in this expression, such as in German er ist fünf Uhr, Swedish Klockan är fem, Finnish Kello on viisi.
Do most English speakers say that it is "seven" when time is 7:59? I think that it is "seven" when hour number is 7.
Are there any words in English where ⟨t⟩ is pronounced in words ending in -quet?
Why has Hungarian never adopted Czech convention to use carons to denote postalveolar and palatal sounds?
Are there any Latinates in English that have letter K before A, O and U?
Can it and they be used as distal demonstrative pronouns in English?
Indeed. Also compare Dutch “Het is vijf uur,” where uur can only be translated as hour(s), not clock. The German and Dutch phrases can be calqued into English as “It's five hours.” (Dutch and German normally don't use the plural of units of measurement.) PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:42, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I am not sure I would agree for the German language. "hours" would be "Stunden"; "Uhr" has the double meaning of "clock" and "o'clock". However, I don't see how it differs from the English phrasing, since "Uhr ist fünf" (analogous to "clock is five") would simply sound wrong to German ears. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 12:03, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any Latinates in English that have letter K before A, O and U that were spelled with letter C in Latin (and possibly in French too)? --40bus (talk) 20:11, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Kale evolved from Northern Middle Englishcale, cal, and ultimately derives from Latin caulis. As for ko and ku, I can't really think of any common English words that start with them and are not obviously of non-Latinate origin (e.g. koala, kukri.) GalacticShoe (talk) 05:22, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
2. No it's not used like that in the UK. I imagine that most people would guess that 7-21 would mean 07:21 (21 minutes past 7 am). I think 07:00 - 21:00 would be understood however, but in normal speech one would use "7 am to 9 pm", in the UK at least. Alansplodge (talk) 22:19, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do English speakers ever refer an hour from 21:00 to 22:00 as "twenty-one"? Is there any English-speaking country where 24-hour clock predominates in writing, and 12-hour clock is used orally at most, but 24-hour clock is common orally too?
They may refer to 21:00 (9 pm) as "21 hours" or "twenty-one hours",[25][26][27] but this means a time of the day, not a period lasting one hour. The one-hour period from 14:00 to 15:00 will most commonly be referred to as "from 2 to 3 pm" or "between 2 and 3 pm". Similarly, one may use "from 21 to 22 hours".[28] --Lambiam11:38, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
2. Not really no. 24 hour time is not in general use in the United States and is only vaguely familiar to most people. It is used in military and hospital contexts where people are expected to learn it. But it is not used for transportation timetables, broadcast announcements, or really any communications designed for the general public. An American adult can generally function perfectly well without being able to use or recognize 24 hour clock references. Eluchil404 (talk) 07:39, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any timetables in US that use 24-hour clock? And can 24-hour clock be used in articles with strong ties to US (I have seen no US-related articles with 24-hour clock) such as: "The Super Bowl begins at 18:40 ET? --40bus (talk) 06:36, 20 December 2024 (UTC) --40bus (talk) 06:29, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
6: Unusually among the world's languages, Hungarian uses a plain ⟨s⟩ for /ʃ/ and a digraph ⟨sz⟩ for /s/, for the reason that the /ʃ/ is in fact more common. Then it makes sense to employ the ⟨s⟩ as a modifier of the alveolar consonants ⟨z, c⟩ /z, ts/ into postalveolar ⟨zs, cs⟩ /ʒ, tʃ/, akin to how Czech uses a caron for that purpose: ⟨š, ž, č⟩ /ʃ, ʒ, tʃ/.
The other set of Hungarian digraphs is the palatals ⟨gy, ty, ny, ly⟩ /ɟ, c, ɲ, j/, the latter having been /ʎ/ historically. They could have written them in the Czech/Slovak fashion as ⟨ď, ť, ň, ľ⟩ – but, for one reason or another, they just didn't. --Theurgist (talk) 19:19, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why English uses letter H in words such as bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah and Utah? In the first two, the ⟨ah⟩ is pronounced as a schwa, so the spelling without H would be more logical (as spelling with H would indicate a long [ɑː] sound). But why Utah has letter H, why it isn't just Uta?
Why English uses ⟨ph⟩ instead of ⟨f⟩ in many words to indicate Greco-Latin Φ/ph? Why is it philosophy, phone, photograph, -phobia and not filosofy, fone, fotograf, -fobia?
In Portuguese, /s/ between two vowels becomes /z/, so spelling or "Brazil" with Z approximates the original word more closely. --40bus (talk) 20:54, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Romans are to blame, according to that article, because, when the pronunciation changed from /ph/ to /f/ and the spelling no longer matched the original pronunciation, they "decided not to change the way it is written in Latin". I wonder, who decided this, the Roman Emperor, or the Senate, or was a plebiscite held? Is it known when this decision was made? --Lambiam10:24, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
More probably, they just continued their scribal practices unaltered after the sounds changed, by default inertia. Those who know something about the history of English should be familiar with that concept... AnonMoos (talk) 01:01, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Some languages have chosen to respell "ph" as "f" -- see https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fotografia and related Wiktionary entries -- but French, which has cultural ties to English, hasn't, nor has English. There's not really any central body in charge of spelling in the English-speaking world which could propose or enact such a change... AnonMoos (talk) 23:19, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One slightly odd (IMO) example is the Cypriot city of Πάφος, which was traditionally (and internationally generally still is) transliterated as Paphos, but is locally transliterated as Pafos. Iapetus (talk) 09:54, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That may have to do with Turkish orthography (Cyprus is bilingual, half Greek, half Turkish), which is rather consistently fonetik. An occurrence of ⟨ph⟩ in a Turkish word, as for example in şüphe, is pronounced as a [p] followed by a [h]. We also find, locally, the more phonetic Larnaka instead of the traditional Larnaca.[32] and Kerinia for Κερύνεια instead of the transliteration Keryneia.[33] --Lambiam11:12, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It doesn't really have anything to do with Turkish. It's just that virtually all common present-day transcription systems for Modern Greek proper names transcribe <φ> with <f>. In Cyprus, this goes both for the PCGN (1962) system formerly used by the British administration, and for the common ELOT system the country later switched to (aligned with usage in Greece). See Transliteration of Greek for some details. Fut.Perf.☼11:40, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Speaking of ph vs. f, it's surprising (to me) how pervasive is the belief that Hitler spelled his given name "Adolph" when every reference worth a damn tells us it's "Adolf". -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]21:10, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, that is weird. I think it might be the case that "Adolph" used to be a normal-ish, if not that common, name among English speakers, so it's kind of an Anglicization, like "Joseph Stalin". These days of course you hardly ever meet an Adolph (though I once knew an Adolfo). --Trovatore (talk) 21:19, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To be fair, looking back at 19th century records from German-speaking areas, name spellings weren't anywhere near as fixed as they are nowadays. You could easily be a Mayr in your birth record, a Mayer in your marriage entry and a Meier in your death record. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 13:07, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
1. While "mitzvah" is generally pronounced with a schwa in ordinary speech, this seems more like the general relaxation of vowels in conversational English. If I were pronouncing it as an isolated word (or phrase with bar or bat), the final a would probably sound more like the a in father. "ah" is a common way of writing that sound. Without the final h, I would tend to pronounce the a in Utah with the sound of a in cat. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 13:04, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Really??? You'd pronounce Uta with a final [æ]? I'm not aware of any accent of English that permits a word-final ash in any normal word. I might not be too surprised to hear it realized in some sort of grunt, like Bah! or something, or maybe Mike Meyers's tyaah...and monkeys might fly outa my butt. --Trovatore (talk) 21:13, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It might be that the pronunciation of mitzvah in English has more to do with the Yiddish than with the Modern Hebrew pronunciation. --Lambiam00:08, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What countries/languages use decimal separators for years?
I sometimes come across texts from various scientific fields where decimal separators are used for years, i.e. December 17 2,024 or 2 024. Does anyone know in what languages or countries this practice is common? The texts are in English but the authors are from around the world and likely write it that way because that's how it's done in their native language. --91.114.187.180 (talk) 21:02, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Our own Manual of Style states, "Do not add a comma to a four-digit year", giving June 2,015 as an example of an unacceptable date format. It is not hard to find examples where "2 024" occurs next to "2024" in one and the same text, so one needs to see this format used consistently before considering its use intentional. Conceivably, some piece of software that is too smart for its own good may see the year as a numeral and autoformat it as such. For the rest of this year, the wikitext {{formatnum:{{CURRENTYEAR}}}} will produce "2,024". --Lambiam10:13, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The way I read that recommendation is, that if you use a decimal separator, it's best to use a space (less confusing than dots or commas), not that one should use a decimal separator. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:06, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It's very uncommon to use decimal separators in numbers of no more than 4 digits, except for alignment in a column also having numbers of 5 or more digits. As years rarely have more than 4 digits, they rarely get decimal separators. PiusImpavidus (talk) 10:11, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Is Hanyu Pinyin a writing system for Chinese of is it just a romanizations system? I have always thought it as a writing system for Chinese. Can it be said that e.g. "letter A is used in Chinese language". --40bus (talk) 22:30, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I know, it's not much used by native-language Chinese speakers to communicate with other Chinese speakers in connected sentences and paragraphs, because it lacks a number of the disambiguation cues which readers of Chinese characters are used to. Without explicit tone marking (diacritics or numbers) it can be rather ambiguous (see Yuen Ren Chao's clasic Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den). Even with tone marking, there can be some difficulties in understanding. Pinyin is used for many other purposes, though... AnonMoos (talk) 05:18, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think that Pinyin is used way more than Romaji. And, for the poem, is there any page where it is written in full, in both characters and pinyin? Wikipedia lists only the first verse. --40bus (talk) 13:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Latin letters "OL" are sometimes used right in the middle of Japanese kanji and kana to write the term "Office lady", which is a word fully adopted into Japanese (probably at least partly coined within Japanese). I wonder if that's found in China? AnonMoos (talk) 00:56, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From my experience, the most common way of typing Chinese in Mainland China is through the Pinyin input method. So it is used daily by almost everyone, but in the sense that it is used to type characters, not to type Pinyin for others to read. --Terfili (talk) 23:03, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think Pinyin is used anywhere in isolation as a replacement of the regular Chinese writing. As mentioned already, the Chinese language has way too many homonyms even when the diacritics are added to distinguish tones. The one application I am aware of is in children's books for learning reading - but then primarily on top of the actual Chinese characters. -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 11:57, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are countries like India, Bangladesh, South Africa, Tonga, Ghana and Kenya, considered to to be English-speaking, as these countries do not have English as a majority native language, but it is used widely in administration. Why English has not become majority native language in South Africa like it has become in US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia? --40bus (talk) 22:35, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding South Africa, it's likely because in the other countries you contrast, Europeans, hence mostly preferrers of English over the indigenous languages, now greatly outnumber the indigenous speakers, whereas in South Africa first-language English speakers are around only 8–9% of the population, ranking around 4th to 6th, and outnumbered even by Afrikaans (evolved from Dutch), around 12% and 3rd. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 00:09, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
And why English is not official language in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Malaysia and Mauritius, despite having been British colonies? And I think that The "Big Six" English speaking countries are UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but is South Africa the seventh? --40bus (talk) 06:36, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Your first question: why? – because the legislators of those countries have not chosen to make it so. Sri Lanka's official languages are Sinhala and Tamil, with English officially a "link language" used in education, science and commerce. Myanmar's is Burmese, and English ceased to be the primary language used in higher education 60 years ago. Malaysia's is Malay, though English is used for some official purposes, and is official in the Assemblies of two States. Mauritius has no official language, but English is the official language of its National Assembly, though the use of French, actually more commonly spoken in the country, is also sanctioned there. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 10:54, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The answer seems pretty clear: native speakers of European languages outside Europe are the where the descendants of European settlers became the majority of the population. The distinct case to mention here is Latin America, where most people are of both Indigenous and European descent, but where majority Indigenous-language areas are limited to Paraguay and subnational regions.
In areas with high linguistic diversity, whichever European language was introduced during colonization often becomes a lingua franca and means of leverage for the speakers of minority languages against those of the plurality language group (Hindi in India, Swahili in Kenya, Zulu in South Africa, Sinhala in Sri Lanka etc.) Remsense ‥ 论05:04, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
English is the official language of Belize, and spoken by over 60% of the population (whose majority is bi- or multi-lingual).
However, being spoken commonly doesn't in itself make English an official language of a country. The majority of Scandinavians and Nordics speak English, and different nationals of the region often use it to converse despite several of their languages being mutually intelligible or nearly so (the PIE but outlier Icelandic, and the non-PIE Finnish and Sami throw spanners into the comprehensibility works). 40bus and others might want to review Lingua Franca. 94.1.223.204 (talk) 21:17, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
...being spoken commonly doesn't in itself make English an official language of a country. True. In fact English is not the, or even an, official language of the United States (though it is, oddly enough, the official language of California). I'm not really sure why you bring in official languages; the original question didn't mention them. --Trovatore (talk) 21:22, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But the OP did ask about them in his first follow-up question – "And why English is not official language in Bangladesh . . . [etc]." {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 01:54, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In countries where English is not an official language, are government websites usually available in English? Are government websites of Latin American countries also in English? --40bus (talk) 23:14, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
One has to be careful with terminology here. Neither the USA nor Australia has an official language, so English isn't an official language in either place. And of course almost all government websites are in English in both countries. HiLo48 (talk) 23:24, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
No, an official language is one used by officials in official proceedings and communications. The official language of both Australia and the United States is unmistakably English, there's just no piece of paper that expressly states this is the case. Remsense ‥ 论23:30, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've never heard a filibuster on the Senate floor in Esperanto. This is a common misconception, but merely one conflating official status with the explicit codification of such. The former sense is a description of reality, the latter is relaying established legal fiction. Remsense ‥ 论23:36, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I understand the distinction, and am just saying it's common for people to take "official" as meaning "codified as official". The language used to conduct the affairs of state is important, and the legal fiction thereof is also important, but one idea is more fundamental than the other. Remsense ‥ 论00:05, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Official" does mean "codified as official". If you're talking about the de facto language in which government is conducted, you should call it something else. --Trovatore (talk) 00:22, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, in my view, you also have it the wrong way around as to which is more fundamental. Fundamentally, government in the United States could be conducted in any language. It isn't, in practice, because too many people wouldn't understand you. But it could be; there is no official barrier to doing so. That's more important than what language is used in practice. --Trovatore (talk) 00:30, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If you would refrain from deciding it's an etymological fallacy, official here does truly mean "of and by officials", i.e. office-holders. Among other things, you'll note the language used by Official language—which is in pretty rough shape but many of its sources are okay—you'll notice among other things that states often declare and recognize, etc., an official language. This makes little sense if the declaration is itself what it means for a language to be official. What is even being referenced if not an underlying state of privileged use by authorities and officials? Remsense ‥ 论01:03, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But that's the thing! Officially, there is no preference for official use of English in the United States (at the federal level). And this is super-important, because it emphasizes that American nationalism is civic, not ethnic. That's why I stick so hard on this point. There is really no official language in the US, and in my opinion there had better not ever be. --Trovatore (talk) 19:53, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There's the U.S. Official English movement, though it seems to have lost steam at the federal level since the 1980s... On Wikipedia, "Official English movement" redirects to "English-only movement", though they're not always the same... AnonMoos (talk) 00:49, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The concept of "official" has taken a lot of hits in recent years. All sorts of things are now commonly deemed to be official when they're nothing of the sort. Here's an example, where a ranking of cities by liveability index placed Melbourne, Australia at the top.
"IT’S official: Australia dominates in the world’s most liveable city stakes".
The analysis was conducted by some private organisation in a far-flung country, yet many Aussies (such as the journalist) displayed their national insecurity by proudly trumpeting this as an incontrovertible official declaration. Melburnians used it to fight the never-ending battle against Sydney, saying the independent referee had spoken, it's been officially decided, and there was no gainsaying it. Independent, yes. Scientific, perhaps. Official, most definitely NOT. Not in any sense of the word. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]22:07, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I recently watched an Indian movie primarily in English, and couldn't help noticing utterance-initial /r/ was frequently realized as what sounded to me like an affricate, [d͡ɻ̝]. I heard "jite" only to realize it was "right", and so on. They may have been [r̝] or [ʐ], but at any rate a sound with frication. "Rather" here also sounds to me like an obstruent. But to my surprise I can't seem to find discussion of this not only on Wikipedia but anywhere. Are there sources for this? Is this type of allophony commonly found in South Asia? Nardog (talk) 13:00, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Do people in countries that use metric system refer to temperatures in groups of 10, such as 0s (0-9 C), 30s (30-39 C), -10s (-19 - -10C), sometimes with "low", "mid", "high" added? How would people pronounce "0s"? -- 40bus
Terms like "the high 60s" used to be used by UK weather forecasters when Fahrenheit was standard, which was also when forecasting was less precise. Nowadays, with much more accurate forecasting enabling exact numbers, and with Celsius in use (which, as Wakuran alludes, anyway has degrees 1.8-times larger than Fahrenheit's) such ranges and terms are much less frequently used in the UK.
The range 0–9 was (in the UK) never routinely referred to as '"the zeros" (to my agéd recollection, though as a joke it would be understood). Terms like "below ten" (or whatever), or "X above zero" were used instead. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 01:50, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I know that some warnings in Australia use these ranges. And if 11 C is "low 10s", then -11 C is "high -10s", because negative temperatures have higher numbers colder. --40bus (talk) 06:15, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the Netherlands, there's occasional talk about "twintigers" (20s) and "dertigers" (30s), and also "dubbele cijfers" (double digits, ≥10°C), but it's more common to use adjectives like "warm" (≥20°C), "zomers" (summer-like, ≥25°C) and "tropisch" (tropical, ≥30°C). In a meteorological context, those adjectives have a precise definition. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:06, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the UK, low, mid, or high teens, twenties or thirties [degrees Celcius] are sometimes used, an example is this London radio station website:
"The rain and grey skies that have dominated the weather in recent weeks have slowly been replaced by sun and temperatures in the mid-twenties over the past few days.[34]
Or this national newspaper:
"There is a 30 per cent chance that temperatures could soar to the mid-30s next week"[35]
Or this from the Met Office, the United Kingdom's national weather and climate service:
The heatwave of 2018 continues across much of England this week, with temperatures expected to reach the high-20s or low 30s Celsius across the Midlands"[36]
Because those temperatures are so uncommon it might rarely apply but I would find saying "temperatures in the negative (mid-)20s" quite reasonable. Canadians, perhaps? -- 79.91.113.116 (talk) 11:49, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are in Ancient Greek sequences of aspirate stops: for example khthoon (earth), etc. I think there are even sequences of identical aspirates (double aspirates) but I couldn't think of any off the top of my head.
Now aspirate stop geminates or even sequences of aspirate stops are, I would think, fairly problematic from the point of view of phonetics.
I guess you could posit that those were sequences of aspirate stops (or double aspirate stops) only in spelling and that in actual fact phonetically there was only one aspiration at the end of the sequence. The problem with this assumption is that those sequences produce sequences of fricatives in Modern Greek, which would seem to indicate in fact two aspirates?
Or do people imagine more complex processes: where the 1st fricative was originally an unaspirate stop that became a fricative under the influence of the 2nd fricative (assimilation) but that only the 2nd fricative goes back to an Ancient Greek aspirate stop?
What's the answer? Is there a consensus?
Incidentally: do sequences of fricatives in Modern Greek only occur in words that are borrowed from Ancient Greek (literate borrowings) or do they occur also in Modern Greek words that are inherited from Ancient Greek?
For the non-homorganic clusters, I'd need to dust up my references for this, but as far as I remember, the natural sound change leading to Modern Greek actually dissimmilated these, leading to clusters of fricative + simple plosive, so Ancient χθ, φθ become χτ, φτ. The χθ, φθ clusters pronounced as double fricatives in Modern Greek are reading pronunciations of inherited spellings. Can't give you refs for the phonetic nature of the clusters before fricatization, off the top of my head. Fut.Perf.☼07:55, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Referring to Ancient Greek phonology, Koine Greek phonology and Medieval Greek, Wiktionary gives the 5th BCE Attic pronunciation for the geminates πφ, τθ, κχ as having both stops aspirated, the 1st CE Egyptian pronunciation with an unaspirated plus an aspirated stop, and the 4th CE Koine as well as later (10th CE Byzantine, 15th CE Constantinopolitan) pronunciations as having an unaspirated stop followed by a fricative. See Σαπφώ, Ἀτθίς, Βάκχος.
For the the non-homorganic clusters, the development seems to be different: both still aspirated in 1st CE Egyptian pronunciation and both fricative in Koine and beyond; see χθών, φθόγγος. --Lambiam11:26, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I suspect (sans evidence) that Greek khth and phth would be better understood as /{kt}ʰ/; that is, the ancients understood the aspiration to belong to the cluster as a whole rather than to the stops separately (or either of them). —Tamfang (talk) 22:09, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
While that may be true, it raises the question why they then did not write φφ, θθ and χχ, and even went as far as writing explicitly ῤῥ. --Lambiam12:56, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was intrigued by the fact that Japanese linguists use the Western borrowed term "akusento" to refer to the pitch accent of Japanese? It seems hard to believe that for all those centuries Japanese linguists and grammarians never thought of studying pitch accent which is a prominent feature of most of the dialects of Japanese. (Korean linguists were certainly aware of the pitch accent of Middle Korean: pitch accent was even marked in some early Hangul texts). If that is not the case, and Japanese linguists have been aware of the pitch accent since the beginning of native linguistic science, then how come the Japanese do not have their own native term for the pitch accent?
Anecdotally, while young Japanese people who study linguistics or even study to become teachers, even primary school teachers, are taught about the Japanese pitch accent, the way the standard language and the dialects differ, etc. many regular Japanese people, particularly fairly old ones, still subscribe to the notion that Japanese pitch contour is a monotone. It is somewhat amusing to see them try and "help" foreigners learning Japanese with artificial demonstrations of how Japanese "ought to be spoken" that so obviously have nothing to do with the way they actually speak.
In the same vein, when was the concept of "syllable" introduced in Japanese linguistics? Is there even a native term for the concept of syllable?
In general Japanese people are aware of kanas (moras) because it is kanas that are written and it is in terms of kanas that the pronunciation of kanji (for example) is described. The so called syllabaries of Japanese are actually "moraic syllabaries". Japanese poetry counts kanas not syllables. Regular Japanese people seem to be completely ignorant of the concept of syllable. For example everyone knows To-u-kyo-u (the capital city) is 4 kanas (and so 4 moras) long but I've never ever heard anyone mention the fact that it has 2 syllables.
I guess Japanese could often have borrowed English terms, due to them being more specific than similar Japanese, often Chinese-derived, homonyms. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 12:16, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
From what I've read, pitch accent in Japanese has a low "Functional load" (as Martinet would express it), and there are significant numbers of people who speak a form of Japanese close to the standard, but without pitch accent. As for borrowing the term from a European language, the fact that it's not a concept which is needed when analyzing the Chinese language could be relevant. (Of course, the concept "syllable" is quite relevant for Chinese.) AnonMoos (talk) 12:44, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For many languages the notion of syllable is rather artificial. Even if it isn't, it may be unclear. How many syllables do English library and Turkish sıhhat have? What are the constituent syllables of the Dutch word voortaan? Since the concept is not particularly meaningful for the Japanese language, it should not be surprising that its speakers are unfamiliar with it. The useful concept known to most Japanese is the on, a concept of which English speakers are generally quite ignorant. --Lambiam12:47, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks guys for your insightful comments. Still, my basic questions are yet unanswered: Are the concepts of "pitch accent" and "syllable" a relatively recent borrowing from Western linguistics or not? (If they're not, and you do have examples of the use of these concepts in traditional Japanese grammar, what is the traditional terminology?) 178.51.16.158 (talk) 14:40, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Japanese uses 音節 (onsetsu) for the concept of a syllable, possibly with the kanji borrowed from Chinese but with unrelated readings. --Lambiam02:54, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. And how about the pitch accent, アクセント? No native Japanese equivalent? And most importantly, no attestation of it being dealt with in traditional Japanese grammar prior to Western contact? 178.51.16.158 (talk) 13:10, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any French loanwords in English where French hard C was changed to K when it was borrowed to English?
Why most languages do not have native words for continents where they are spoken? For example, neither Finnish nor English have native word for Europe, nor does Swahili have native word for Africa.
@40bus: As an ordinary, little-knowing person, I think the 2. is quite obvious: when languages were emerging, people didn't know there is such thing like 'a continent' and that they were living on one. So there were no such concept known to them, consequently no need to invent either a general word 'continent' nor a specific name for the one where they lived. --CiaPan (talk) 22:04, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
1. Thre only one that springs to mind is "skeptical" from the French sceptique. Here in Britain, the usual spelling is "sceptical", but apparently the "k" variant was preferred by 19th-century lexicographers in America, out of deference to its Greek roots. [37]Alansplodge (talk) 15:13, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I recently had occasion to use this phrase, which I believe I learned from my grandma, and it occurred to me I wasn't sure everyone knew it. I went and looked it up in Wiktionary, and found a definition I consider wrong, which I corrected.
But searching, it does seem like the "wrong" definition may actually have some currency in the wild.
My understanding is that to borrow trouble (against tomorrow/against the future/etc) is to spend a lot of effort worrying about or preparing for an adverse event that may never happen. I think this is clearly the definition that makes the most sense and is best historically grounded. Similar sayings include Jesus ("sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof") and William Inge ("worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due").
The other understanding is that it means "stir up trouble". A Quora post I found claims that this is actually the older meaning, which it dates from the 1850s, whereas the "worry" meaning it dates to the 20th century. This rendering, to me, makes much less sense — in what way is this supposed to be "borrowing"?
Anyway, I would be interested to know if high-quality attestations can be found for the "provocation" meaning, and how it might have come about if it actually predated the "worry" meaning. --Trovatore (talk) 00:57, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
To me the 'stir up' makes sense. 'Borrowing' implies that you now actually have something: if you just worry about something, it may never materialise, but if you talk and/or act in the wrong ways, potential trouble may become actual. I (in the UK) have always read/heard the phrase as being about bringing trouble upon oneself unnecessarily.
The saying is an example of an idiom, where the literal meaning is not (at least any longer) what it actually means. Both individual words, and idioms and other sayings, can drift in meaning over long periods. They may also differ in current varieties of English.
Many expressions in English originate from sailing. The nautical meaning of borrow, "to approach closely to either land or wind" is quoted in the OED from William Henry Smyth's The Sailor's Word Book of 1867 and obviously describes a manouvre with some risk; See also the golfing use of the word – the amount a ball on a sloping green will drift to one side of the hole, which the putting player must compensate for. (If the player compensates too much, they are said to have "over-borrowed".)
May I gently suggest that if you want to correct (or otherwise edit) material in Wiktionary, you should (as here) do so only on the basis of published Reliable sources, not on "what you (or your Granny) know". Many (all?) families have their own internal expressions and word meanings, and every individual has their own idiolect – ones different from yours (or mine) are not automatically "wrong". {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 03:09, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Which is why I made a suggestion, rather than issuing a ukase. Although Wiktionary does not have that formal requirement, it would be improved if editors there chose to follow it anyway. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 16:21, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really know the norms on Wiktionary in detail. I believe though that it's based on "attestations" rather than "sources". The only real sources for meanings of words are usually -- other dictionaries, which has an obvious circularity problem. (Similarly, at Wikipedia, which is a tertiary source, we should not ordinarily be relying on other tertiary sources).
As to the merits, the point is that "borrowing" innately involves the idea of the future. You borrow against income you expect to have tomorrow. If you're just creating trouble from scratch, that's not being a borrower, that's being a producer. But if you worry about something not under your control and that may never come to pass, that's borrowing that potential trouble from tomorrow, and making it actual trouble (for you) today. --Trovatore (talk) 20:02, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Webster’s New World College Dictionary, 4th Edition: "to worry about anything needlessly or before one has sufficient cause";
Penguin Random House/HarperCollins: "to do something that is unnecessary and may cause future harm or inconvenience".
Sense 1 is also found in Longman: "to worry about something when it is not necessary".[38]
Sense 2 is found in Merriam–Webster: "to do something unnecessarily that may result in adverse reaction or repercussions".[39] Dictionary.com has the stronger "Go out of one's way to do something that may be harmful".[40] --Lambiam12:07, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Idioms are often literal nonsense. Back and forth implies returning before departing: Wiktionary's definition is "From one place to another and back again", not "Returning from a place and then going to it". Head over heels is the normal configuration for a human, and indeed the expression has inverted over time from an earlier heels over head. You can easily and naturally have your cake and eat it too. The difficult thing is eating a cake that you don't, at that point in time, have: or eating a cake and having it later, too. Card Zero (talk)20:49, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The two senses have in common that the subject is doing something unnecessary, and that someone sees potential trouble ahead. In the first sense it is the subject who sees the (unprovoked) trouble, and what they do is worry. In the second sense it is the speaker who fears trouble if the subject does a provocative act. (The speaker may in this case coincide with the subject.)
Looking at books of idioms, it looks almost as if a switch-over occurred between 2008 and 2010.
For the worry sense:
1977, Early American Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases.[42]
2010, Oxford Dictionary of English Idioms.[45] (labelled "North American")
2013, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.[46]
2015, Professional Learner's Dictionary of Spoken English.[47]
These are "mentions", not "uses", and not usable as attestations on Wiktionary. For attestations of the "provoke" sense:
2016, Stacy Finz, Borrowing Trouble. Kensington, p. 22:[48]
Brady hadn’t bothered to change his name, figuring it was common enough. But he stayed off Facebook and Twitter. When Harlee Roberts had wanted to write a feature story about him for the Nugget Tribune, he’d politely declined. No need to borrow trouble.
2024 June 11, Kristine Francis, “7 Little Johnstons Recap 06/11/24: Season 14 Episode 14 ‘Burpees and Burp Clothes’”, Celeb Dirty Laundry:[49]
Brice didn’t want talk about it because he thought it was borrowing trouble.
2024 August 7, Colby Hall, “Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary Defends Kamala Harris Avoiding Press to Fox News: Her Campaign is In ‘Euphoric Stage!’”, Mediaite:[50]
From O’Leary’s perspective, shared during Wednesday morning appearance on America’s Newsroom, Harris is enjoying so much momentum at the moment, things are going so well for her since she became the nominee; she has little reasons to borrow trouble by taking tough questions during a press conference or a journalist willing to challenge her.
Against this is the fact that I (a Brit) have taken the expression to have the 'provoke' sense since the early 1960s). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 17:53, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In this sentence, the interrogative content clause is the object, what you know. The word what is a fused relative pronoun, not a clause. --Lambiam11:39, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The other two would normally be phrased as:
"Jack likes it more than Kate does." (Or less commonly, "Jack likes it more than Kate likes it.")
Or "I drink milk and you do too". Pondering this street has the name it has, "I drink milk you drink" makes sense, and has a similar structure, but not the required meaning. Card Zero (talk)20:59, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The third sentence is grammatical but may not mean what you think it means. (Intransitive "drink" in English tends to mean "drink alcohol", quite likely to excess.) --Trovatore (talk) 20:16, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In my dialect of (American) English I think I would prefer does even in the first sentence, i.e. "This is why this street has the name (that) it does.", without necessarily considering 'has' wrong. As others have said, the lack of repetition of the direct objects is a bigger problem than not replacing the verbs with a form of 'do'. It makes the sentence sound wrong or have another implication (as "drink"=consume alcohol to excess) rather than just sound non-native. Eluchil404 (talk) 01:36, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The possibility to use lexical (i.e. non-auxiliary) have without do-support ("At long last, have you no decency, sir?") is quite exceptional; it is unique in this respect among lexical verbs. Colloquially, this is far more common in British English, but seems to be dying out also there, sounding stiff. --Lambiam02:13, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
How are demonyms of overseas territories determined? Are people from Isle of Man, Channel Islands and British Overseas Territories "British"? Are people from all French overseas departments, collectivities and territories "French"? Are people from both Caribbean Netherlands, Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten "Dutch"? And I have never seen demonyms formed from French overseas department names, such as "Réunionian", "Guadeloupean", "French Guinanan", "Mayottean", "Martiniquean", so are their people just "French"? Is this same from overseas collectivities and territories? --40bus (talk) 23:08, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is no system to it. The inhabitants of Corsica are French but still have a demonym, Corsican. The demonym Curaçaoan can be used for the inhabitants of Curaçao. In both cases these terms are ambiguous, because they are also used for members of specific ethnic groups. --Lambiam01:37, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Most regions, islands, cities, etc have demonyms, and even for those that don't, you can always say "a <toponym> person" or "a person from <toponym>" if you want to be more precise than just indicating the country. Or if you're asking whether those people are legally full British, Dutch and French nationals, then WP:RDH or WP:RDM would be a better place for that. --Theurgist (talk) 03:03, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
40bus -- The Isle of Man and the Channel Islands are under the British Crown, but technically they aren't part of the UK. The demonym for the Isle of Man is "Manx" adjective (as in the famous tailless cat), "Manxman" noun, but you wouldn't be able to predict that. AnonMoos (talk) 03:16, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Although Manx people (and Channel Islanders) are British Citizens. [51] Like everything connected with British governance, it's a tottering pile of complex traditions and reforms; we have never re-started with a clean sheet, and don't intend to either. Alansplodge (talk) 12:41, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Martiniquais, Guadeloupéen and Réunionais are commonly used in French; I guess you just don't run across their English equivalents that often. For Mayotte, which has been in the news a lot of late, the demonym is "Mahorais" for some reason I haven't explored. Other overseas territories have demonyms as well (e.g. Guyanais); this goes even though their inhabitants hold French citizenship. Xuxl (talk) 14:49, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
American citizens include Californians, Texans, Rhode Islanders, Pennsylvanians, etc. Australians include New South Welshmen, Queenslanders, Victorians, etc. The Soviet Union was populated by Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, etc, all of whom were Soviet citizens. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]15:38, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A Jar of Cranberry Sauce; or, The Crime in Room 13 may have been a silent film, but I cannot find any information about it or its plot. If anyone has any knowledge about this possibly non-existent film, I would be delighted to hear. Thank you in advance. Oleeveeya(talk)13:00, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
It has an entry, with plot, in the IMDb, here, and a mention (in Polish) on Filmweb, here. Evidently one or more computer games have recently been based on it, or reports of it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.211.243 (talk) 14:32, 9 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm helping to build the set for an amateur showing of Little Shop of Horrors (musical), set in the early 1960s in poor areas in an unnamed US city, centering around a flower shop. What Wikipedia articles or general information is there on unmaintained city design and material, flower shops, posters of the era, etc.?
Hello, I apologize if this is the wrong spot to ask this. I'm currently doing the "suggested edits" from my own home page, to try and gain a bit more practical editing experience, and the first I got was Superhero film.
A lot of the "citation needed" templates seem to be concerning justifying the release dates of each work; right now, I'm looking e.g. at "The following year, the sequel titled Ultraman Zearth 2: Superhuman Big Battle - Light and Shadow premiered." from the "1978–1998: Rising popularity with Superman, Kamen Rider, Batman, and Ultraman Zearth" section, and I'm wondering what's the best practice to source this kind of thing.
I'm assuming that, per WP:IMDB, that website (which on my personal time would be the first source I look at for release dates) doesn't work because it's USERGENERATED; so, where else should I be looking?
Hmm - I would normally be okay with Rotten Tomatoes, but WP:ROTTENTOMATOES does also state that "There is consensus that Rotten Tomatoes should not be used for biographical information, cast and crew data, or other film and television data, as it is sourced from user-generated and user-provided content with a lack of oversight and verification."
Thanks again for your help! I think I'll try using the two you mentioned that aren't at RSP, then.
Anyway, if editors looking at the page in the future find issue with these sources, they can always discuss on the talk page, or at WP:RSN. Or better yet, add more reliable sourcing. NewBorders (talk) 17:19, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
In the cases (perhaps all of them) where the true answer is "no", it may be hard to demonstrate (though it's not logically impossible to prove a negative, it can be impractically difficult), but it would help to try to find answers if you could list the 15 plays in question, by using the references in the series' article to subtract the 123 listed 'lost' plays (Reference 4) from the list of all 138 of the plays (Reference 1). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 17:45, 16 December 2024 (UTC) 94.1.223.204 (talk) 17:45, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
regarding the comparative difficulty of Chopin's etudes
Hard is a somewhat subjective judgement. For me, comparing these two is like comparing one kind of impossible with another. Oh, I can play the notes ok but my speed is ridiculously slow. -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]19:22, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
‘Mr. Horowitz, which are the most difficult of the Chopin Etudes?’ — “Ah, all are terrible. [...] For me, the most difficult of all is the C Major, the first one, Op. 10, No. 1. [...] Also, I can’t do the A minor, Op. 10, No. 2. Richter told me he could never do it, either.”[52] --Lambiam10:59, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The audio CD version (sold together with the book) is listed on Amazon (see here). Whether this is the Sallis recording or a different narrator is not mentioned. Copies might crop up on e.g. Ebay or similar 2nd-hand vendors, but cassette tape eventually deteriorates so the playability of one made almost 50 years ago would be iffy. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 23:47, 18 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
If any websites sell 'something', they need customers to be able to find them. The 'something' would therefore almost certainly show up in any appropriately-worded web search. If you have web-searched for 'something' and not found it, it's a strong indication that the 'something' is not currently being advertised and/or sold (at least online), either new or (currently) via Ebay and other resale sites. On the latter, of course, any 2nd-hand item might show up at any time. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 20:59, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Most important potential outcome? Largest spectator attendance? Largest combined score? Most hyped in the media? We cannot know what you (or the OP, if different) mean by "biggest" (or "most big") unless you define it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 20:43, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The Moonstone book appears to have three characters from the book that die and it appears that in the 1972 tv series adaptation less of the characters die so how many of the characters from The Moonstone 1972 tv series adaptation die. Also tell me if I was right saying that three of the characters from The Moonstone book die and if I was right tell me each character from the book that dies as well. Matthew John Drummond (talk) 19:58, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
A question better asked on the Italian Wikipedia, since this Italian-language adaptation was made and broadcast in Italy. It's possible that some responder on this en.Wikipedia Ref desk might be able to find out, but seems to me unlikely. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 20:50, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, right. I didn't spot this one, because in The Moonstone#Adaptations (where I looked), it's appended to the entry for the 1959 version and thus less noticeable, and the next entry is for the Italian production, which I assumed was the one the OP meant – apologies. Obviously, one would have to both re-read the book (which would take several hours – it's 450+ pages) and watch the DVD to work out the answers to the questions, and I do not possess the latter. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 17:39, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There is nothing to suggest they would be related; they are paid models. Just like "families" shown in movies are not actually related; they are actors. Shantavira|feed me15:16, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
For use in such posed photographs there are many agencies that offer well-prepared socially presentable WASP models of whatever ages you specify at short notice and at competitive prices. To add the requirement that the models are related in real life is unnecessary, would incur greater hiring expense and is therefore less than probably done here. The ostensible mother could in that case be complimented on her fresh appearance after gestating and birthing the two siblings. Shantaviraj mentions movie stardom where being born to an established star has for many, with some salient exceptions, proven to be more a burden than a boon on their career. Philvoids (talk) 15:59, 10 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What is it like for mental health clients to live in group homes? What is paid out-of-pocket? What is paid by insurance?
As a diagnosee of schizotypal personality disorder and other disorders, and being thought to still be on the Autistic Spectrum by some therapists despite a rediagnosis to the above disorder, is there a group home near or in Hutchinson, KS for anyone with my types of disorders?
I hope to no longer have to pay $450/month in rent and over $100/month in energy bills as well as $70/month in Cox internet at 1 GBPs if I move into a group home and have health insurance pay for it all.
I would only intend to live there until all of my debts are paid off and once I have substantial investments saved up, including dividend stocks so I can live off of a passive income that pays for basic living expenses in a normal residence again.
The only people who could possibly answer this are KanCare Sunflower health insurance. Look at the terms of your agreement or ask them directly on their help line. Shantavira|feed me09:56, 11 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I received an unsolicited email soliciting a contribution to an upcoming issue of a biomedical journal. My contribution, they assured me, coming from an eminent researcher like me, would greatly enhance the quality of said issue. This may well be true, but, since my knowledge of biomedical issues has largely been formed by doing research to answer questions at the Reference desk, this does not bode well for the quality of this issue, even with my eminent contribution. I don't want my name to be associated with low-quality journals, so I'll refrain from contributing.
The email states at the bottom, in fine greyish print,
BioMed Grid LLC, California, USA. If you do not wish to receive this email, revert us.
I indeed do not wish to receive this email and would like to unreceive it. But I can't figure out how to revert this company. Can anyone help me? (There are some more companies I'd also like to revert.) --Lambiam09:19, 12 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
But is it? I'd never seen this before. Our article on the journal states that the publisher, Biomedgrid LLC, was first registered in California in 2018 by Sasidhar Vontethina and Sushma Manchikanti, both Indian (more specifically Telugu) names. --Lambiam08:58, 15 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I also question this. I'd be befuddled if I was asked to revert a company. But then, I always wince when I hear "write me" rather than "write to me" (other than "write me a letter"). -- Jack of Oz[pleasantries]19:27, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What are similarities and differences between LUFS meter (especially momentary) and Audiosurf's audio analysis algorithm (when comes to how tracks are colored in particular way depending on the song intensity)? Considering the color (when "fancy coloring" mode is enabled) of momentary LUFS bar on my own multichannel peakmeter when fed with the same song as the video, lines up with the color of the blocks and the tracks on this video and/or this sometimes and at other times, it doesn't line up assuming they somehow sync with the video. 2001:448A:3070:DCCD:D862:849B:9C69:6E43 (talk) 03:43, 13 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The article about the Audiosurf game tells that the game engine analyzes an imported song to create and save its dynamics in an ASH file. Reverse engineering these files to extract the generating algorithms is research that is beyond anyone here. This is proprietary information that the game creator Dylan Fitterer may choose to withold. Already as you look for correlation between your objective LUFS detector and the game screen, bear in mind that where the object of Audiosurf is more to entertain than analytical logging, some degree of randomity may be deliberately included. Philvoids (talk) 16:32, 14 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The word "meta" means “beyond” and “about”. The word “physics” means “nature”. Therefore, metaphysics can be regarded as the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality and existence. Stanleykswong (talk) 06:45, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Των μετά τα φυσικάThe Ancient Greek preposition μετά also means "next, after". It is generally thought that the title of Aristotle's book Των μετά τα φυσικά (Tōn metá ta phusiká), "Of the things after Physica", the etymon of our term metaphysics, was given to it (not by Aristotle but by the editor) simply because it was the next book in series, following Aristotle's book Physica, "Natural phenomena". --Lambiam11:22, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Reading these posts (this and this) on a thread about foo_enhanced_spectrum_analyzer in HydrogenAudio forum about my doings that "scared" off a developer of foo_enhanced_spectrum_analyzer and foo_loudness_peakmeter components for foobar2000 player and yet, the developer of a spectrum analyzer plugin for MusicBee did implement my feature requests into this plugin despite I've not have written fanon wiki pages about future version of CoolEdit Nostalgia (like I did this and this before). So, why would they? 2001:448A:3070:EA0F:F1A2:31A3:43A5:587B (talk) 18:22, 16 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I don't understand finance, so I thought I'd ask. If I buy a futures contract for say a ton of corn at a specific price, and I hold it until the delivery date, will someone literally deliver a ton of corn to me? Thanks. Therapyisgood (talk) 00:04, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The contract is likely to read "FOB Kansas City," or something like that. You'll probably have to move it from whatever transportation it is on (train, ship) yourself. Or, arrange (pay for) delivery. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 01:38, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
At the delivery date, the current buyer will have become the proud owner of a ton of corn somewhere. The identity of the buyer of the contract almost always changes, so the seller drawing up the contract does not know the identity of the eventual buyer at the delivery date. Therefore, wherever the "somewhere" may be, you as the buyer can be reasonably sure it will not be delivered to your doorstep. --Lambiam09:54, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Oil futures have even been known to have a negative price, when the producers' local storage was full and demand was low. At that point the buyer of the contract is being paid to take it away. [53] --Amble (talk) 20:30, 17 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
True, but this depends on both parties agreeing to a new or modified contract. If the buyer does the unexpected and just sits it out, as suggested in the original question, and also does not agree to a new contract, the seller is obligated to produce the asset to the buyer, even if this means they need to go and buy it on the market. --Lambiam10:58, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, a futures contract is ultimately for purposes of delivery of the specified contract in accordance with its terms. A standard corn futures contract is for 5000 bushels (although there is also a mini corn future for only 1000 bushels). A bushel of corn (maize) weighs 56 pounds, so at settlement the buyer owns 140 tons of corn (or, for a mini corn future, 28 tons).
When asked "WHO IS YOUR X?" (X still being unknown to me but is known to the respondents), here are the answers I get:
A answers: "A"
B answers: "C"
C answers: "C"
D answers: "F"
E answers: "F"
F answers: "F"
To sum up, the special phenomenon here is that, everybody has their own X (usually), and if any respondent points at another respondent as the first respondent's X, then the other respondent must point at themself as their X.
I wonder who the unknown X may be, when I only know that X is a natural example from everyday life. I thought about a couple of examples, but none of them are satisfactory, as follows:
X is the leader of one's political party, or X is one's mayor, and the like, but all of these examples attribute some kind of leadership or superiority to X, whereas I'm not interested in this kind of solution - involving any superiority of X.
Here is a second solution I thought about: X is the first (or last) person born in the year/month the respondent was born, and the like. But this solution involves some kind of order (in which there is a "first person" and a "last person"), whereas I'm not interested in this kind of solution - involving any order. 79.177.151.182 (talk) 12:11, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I mean that everybody has their own X (usually), whether X is one's mayor, or X is the leader of one's political party, and so forth. Additionally, keep in mind that if any respondent points at another respondent as the first respondent's X, then the other respondent must point at themself as their X. 79.177.151.182 (talk) 15:21, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
There are too many possible answers that still don't involve order or superiority.
- Translator
- Publisher
- Spokesperson
- Copyeditor
- Cleaner
- Keyholder (person who closes a shop and responsible for turning up in cases of property related emergencies - sometimes it's a manager but sometimes it's merely someone who is willing to stay late or be early)
- Scribe
- Accountant
- Driver
Basically anything where there's a "role" in a group but usually only one (barring circumstances).
I don't believe it. A publisher doesn't have necessarily a publisher, because it normally is not an author. A keyholder could be a trusted neighbour,who doesn't work at the shop and is therefore not its own keyholder (at least in relation to the shop). Of course in relation to its own living quarters mostly everybody is a keyholder, but that was not part of the definition. Even a translator doesn't translate itself when it expresses itself in the foreign language. At least not necessarily. Even a cleaner doesn't necessarily cleans up after itself. I know one! Personally!
So this is interesting linguistically and socially - the use of the word "usually" lets in a lot of the examples given, at least in some societies. However mathematically you are looking for something impossible. Lets assume that everyone has an X (or equivalently ignore those people without an X, who are also no-one's X). The relation partitions the set into subsets (i.e. the subsets include all the elements, and each element is in one and only one subset). Each subset has one self-X call it C for centre, and all the other elements (0 or more of them) point to C. Example, whole numbers under the relation "what is the remainder if you are divided by 5". 5 subsets with C=0, 1, 2, 3, 4. In every case there is a "privileged" centre, whether it would be considered superior, inferior or just special is open to interpretation. You can only have no centres in the case where there are no elements at all. All the best: RichFarmbrough21:07, 20 December 2024 (UTC).[reply]
Why Googlehas not launched Street View in mainland China? There do exist several user-submitted photos, mostly from landmarks and historical cities, but why Google cars have not traveled there yet? How likely is that in 2034, mainland China will have photos by Google cars if Street view is launched there?
And, why South Korea, a country with a large economy and almost no bans, still has large unphotographed areas with most minor cities and major freeways are not photographed entirely? And could North Korea ever get Street View by Google cars? --40bus (talk) 17:54, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
My dream would be every country in the world having full coverage. Is that likely in next 20 years? At least Belarus's lack of Street View should be corrected. I would like to see views from every country. --40bus (talk) 06:21, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Though a multinational, Google is at base an American company, or at least is perceived as such.
Think about the political tensions between the Peoples Republic of China, and the West in general and the USA in particular. Now ask yourself – how might the Government of China feel about American-controlled spy-cars driving around the whole of China, photographing everything visible? {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 20:51, 19 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
That is (obviously) not the reason; your tin foil hat is malfunctioning. The USA does not require something as lowtech as a 360 camera mounted on a car to drive through an area to spy on that area. The reason is that Google does not want to waste its money. And China has a habit of creating local state-owned alternatives to foreign services, allowing those to rip off the foreign tech, and then massively disadvantaging the foreign company. They have done this many times before. Polygnotus (talk) 01:10, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not suggesting that the US would want (or need) to do this. I'm asking how the Chinese Government would welcome the appearance of it, particularly in the perception of their own people. International relations and management of internal perceptions are all about opinions, beliefs, and what can be spun, regardless of truth.
Recently, in my own country, Chinese visitors and personnel from an ostensible language school fomented a totally spurious 'incident' at a London railway terminus, by approaching a well-known busker and YouTuber filming his and others' performances on a public piano, and then insisting that he stop filming, complaining to police present that he was violating their rights by filming them. This was not done for any valid reason, but (presumably) to try to manipulate public opinion within China, and create a spurious 'grievance' to use in diplomatic discussions. Such games go on all the time. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 94.1.223.204 (talk) 01:36, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I'm asking how the Chinese Government would welcome the appearance of it I have answered the original question; please don't hijack this thread to ask a vaguely related question and then bring up unrelated stuff (which was not recent but a year ago, and a storm in a teacup, and your conspiracy theory is not supported by evidence). There are plenty of diplomatic incidents between China and the UK; neither side has a need to manufacture one. If you want to ask a new question, please post it in a new section. Thank you, Polygnotus (talk) 01:44, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for proving my point. The CCP killed insane numbers of people through brutality and incompetence. But we should still call out tin foil conspiracy nonsense. The idea that all conspiracies about the "other" must be true, just because we don't like them, is a very very dangerous one. Just like the idea that everyone who points out that some conspiracies about the "other" are false must be an "other". Polygnotus (talk) 12:07, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Relations between Google and the Chinese government have been difficult for years. China wants its citizens to see only a censored version of the internet, requiring Google to filter results from its search engine. In case of Street View, the Chinese government is concerned about what their own citizens can see (and I suppose they also want to know who views which streets). Google isn't very eager to comply with all China's request, as that could be quite expensive and bad for their image in less authoritarian states. PiusImpavidus (talk) 19:44, 20 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
40bus, it is not based in the UK despite its British sounding name. The Encyclopaedia Britannica has been published in the United States since 1901. That's two years before the first human piloted airplane flight. Cullen328 (talk) 07:57, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why it is not based in the UK? And if it is read and edited by people in metric countries, why many of its articles use imperial units first? It even uses British English spelling. And are there any similar UK-based online encyclopedias? --40bus (talk) 08:36, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Are there any web pages from late 1980s and early 1990s that are still in their original address, rather than on Internet Archive? Was it common for a company or person to have website in early 1990s? --40bus (talk) 07:53, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have a List of websites founded before 1995. The IN2P3 site from 1992 can still be visited, where you may enjoy seeing the French National Institute for Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics's contact details, a small picture of the building, and five hyperlinks. The article says there were 2,879 websites established before 1995, so no, it wasn't common. Card Zero (talk)09:19, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Were there any websites around in 1990? This year feels still relatively recent. And are there any saved TV broadcasts from that time in the web, from any country? --40bus (talk) 11:47, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Fred, know Rudy Giuliani's father, who is said to have been a mob contract killer? I'm asking because I've heard rumors somewhere that both Donald and Fred had mob contacts in New York City.Rich (talk) 22:43, 21 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
"Said to have been"; is there a reliable source that claims this? It has also been said that Donald Trump is a shape shifting lizard.[54] Harold Giuliani was at the bottom of the low end of shady dealings in the Italian immigrant community. It seems extremely unlikely that Fred Trump, a high-profile successful real-estate developer from the German immigrant community, would have a reason to meet him. --Lambiam10:38, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The OP did not ask whether it was plausible but whether it was true. Even if the mob contract killer story should prove more than randomly created innuendo, there is still nothing to suggest the two fathers ever met. The suggested mob contacts would not make this more likely than two random New Yorkers (like Henri who sometimes ordered pizza and Freddy who sometimes delivered pizza) knowing each other. It is very difficult to prove a negative, but the question implied the OP thought it was at least plausible, which, as I tried to point out, it is not. --Lambiam01:09, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I did not dispute the rumours exist, but IMO they are irrelevant to the question whether the two fathers knew each other, so I ignored them. --Lambiam01:09, 23 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for finding this, Polygnotus. But are you sure Rudy would have mentioned it in his eulogy, being possibly embarrassed about his father's occupation? And mentioning an acquaintance with his father would not make Fred seem more illustrious, which eulogies are meant to do. Rich (talk) 19:03, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I want to add an article for a place in delhi cantonment. However, i am unsure about the relevant Wikipedia policies on this topic. I tried searching on DuckDuckGo to no avail And the results of Wikipedia search gave unrelated things. What are the relevant policies? KhubsuratInsaan (talk) 11:16, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You may find this guide a good starting point. Be sure in particular to study the section on notability. You may also want to look up articles about similar places (if those articles exist) and review them to get a sense of what does and does not go into such an article.
It looks like you're new to Wikipedia. (Welcome!) You may find it easier to write an article from scratch and get it past article review or new pages patrol if you spend some time here first editing other pages and getting to understand the culture. That's not a strict requirement, just something a lot of people benefit from when they first arrive! -- Avocado (talk) 14:28, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I was looking at Classification of Indian cities. In tier Y, there are more than 100 cities listed. But in the reference given there are only 88. I even looked what appears to be official website, there's no new circular of new list. [55] Are there any other circulars or should I just remove extra cities. Also, as my main purpose to look for a tier classification, was to use it as approximation for urban (Tier X and Y) and rural districts (Tier Z). Is there any other department which does this kind of classification, please let me know. -- Parnaval (talk) 17:13, 22 December 2024 (UTC)[reply]
![{\displaystyle \mathbb {Z} [e^{\pi i/4}]}](https://wikimedia.riteme.site/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/5772272d0265d24456c81add45167572536d99fb)
![{\displaystyle L[U]}](https://wikimedia.riteme.site/api/rest_v1/media/math/render/svg/56e59dd87836776a6ed8970114b740062769688f)
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