Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2008 December 4

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

December 4

Ground transportation from Newark/EWR

How long does it take to get from Newark Intl Airport/ EWR to Penn Station via AirTrain Newark and New Jersey Transit? We're talking about afternoon/early evening of a weekday (start: probably 4:30-ish or later). Thanks! Thanks for answering (talk) 01:28, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

You will wait up to 3 minutes for the AirTrain. Depending on your terminal, it will then take you about 10 minutes to reach the NJ Transit station. You will then wait up to 20 minutes for a New York bound train, which will take a little under 30 minutes to reach Penn Station. Total elapsed time: 40–63 minutes depending on your wait times. Marco polo (talk) 01:59, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

How would one have built his own home in the 1920s?

Yes, it's me again, with family history inspiring another query, because the relatives living are still a bit young to know details.

I know that my great-grandfather built the house he and his family lived in - and where my great-uncle still resides - in the early 1920s. History says he built it "himself." (This, BTW, would be in a city of about 120,000, not rural but not huge, either.) It has a basement, which I'm perhaps most curious about of all.

How would one do this. If I ever hear from the one living there now, he might have some clue, but I was wondering if any of you knew any links that would tell how homes were built then. Obviously, it's different from today; not near as many contractors, permits, etc., but to build a house singlehandedly, especially digging a basement as part of it, seems like a lot of work. Especially since they didn't have the backhoe and other bg equipment yet. Would it have been mroe similar to a barn raising like one would see in rural areas?

Thanks in advance; this reference desk is really nice.Somebody or his brother (talk) 02:20, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Are you sure that "built it himself" means "did all the work?" Not to doubt your family story, just to point out that what that phrase means is not the same from one person to the next. My brother-in-law built his house, too -- and did a good deal of the custom carpentry himself. He did not pour the foundation by hand; he didn't do all the plumbing with his two hands; essentially he was his own general contractor. Yours could have, of course; I'm just saying people tend to remember impressions more than facts. IN a city of 120,000 (definitely not "rural" in 1920) he could easily have swapped labor with others, or hired cheaply to dig a basement. --- OtherDave (talk) 02:33, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

It's entirely possible. My spouse's great-uncles hand-dug a basement for their mother with buckets and shovels decades after the house had been built. Just takes perseverance - my brother-in-law a couple of years ago hand-dug graves in old cemeteries where equipment couldn't be used and a 6 foot by 6 foot by 3 foot hole could be dug in several hours. Rmhermen (talk) 02:55, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I have a family member who bought and build a Sears Catalog Home sometime around the 10s or 20s. I know they were relatively popular in certain rural areas of Saskatchewan.NByz (talk) 05:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

If he had experience as a carpenter, electrician, plumber, excavator, roofer, mason, and concrete installer, then he might have "built it himself." But many parts of erecting a structure require multiple sets of hands. I sincerely doubt that one person, unaided, erected the house described under the circumstances specified, unless he was Superman or Popeye on Spinach. Maybe he was the carpenter and general contractor. Edison (talk) 05:51, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Building your own home normally involves bringing in people to do specialized work and just being there to provide grunt help, or not even that if you're rich. I helped build my parents home which they designed themselves and we had people in for all stages. For me it involved lots of hard work carrying up buckets of cement and things like that. Things like plastering for instance really need an expert and it has to be inspected at various stages. Dmcq (talk) 14:49, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Having all that experience isn't that uncommon, even now. My father, grandfather, great-grandparents each built at least one home including doing at least part of every kind of work involved. Perhaps those living in large cities are less familiar but where I grew up working on your house was as common as working on your car or your barn or your tractor. It is a fair point that several jobs usually require more than one set of hands but even log cabins have been built by a single person. Rmhermen (talk) 18:48, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I think it's do-able. I built a garden shed starting with a pile of lumber and lots of boxes of screws over thanksgiving weekend. It's framed with 2x4's, properly roofed with shingles and has siding just like a house and I designed it pretty much as I went along. A basic "shotgun" style house would basically be more of the same. Electrical work is easy - I've wired up rooms dozens of times, sheetrock is hard work - but you can do it. The only thing I might need help with would be plumbing and plastering...but it's not hard to imagine someone who picked up on those skills too being able to do the whole thing. It takes longer if you LITERALLY have to do it yourself - but having an occasional helper to hold something while you hammer it into submission does help. The toughest part would probably be making sure everything's up to code and passing all of the inspections - but that wouldn't have been a problem in the 1920's. Digging a basement would be a lot of work - but given a few weeks of dry weather, you could do it. SteveBaker (talk) 04:54, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Good free chess computer game?

What the title says. I don't want to buy Vista but I feel left out that everyone at my school can play ches son their laptops, lol. 67.169.56.73 (talk) 02:55, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Well, there's always chess.com. Useight (talk) 04:50, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

GNU Chess is open-sourced - so it's free - and it's actually a pretty strong program. It's unusual in that the interface for the player is super-crude. You type in a move - it prints its move. No graphics - nothing. However, it's designed so that other programs can provide the graphics and fancy point'n'click stuff. There are MANY programs that do the job of providing graphics for GNU Chess...under Windows, you'd probably want to use WinBoard. In fact, there are literally dozens of 'chess engines' that use the same interface as GNU chess - so you can generally pick the 'engine' that you like and pair it up with the user interface you like to make your own setup. Our article Chess engine says that there are HUNDREDS of chess engines to choose from - and lists a couple of dozen of them.

Crafty is a pretty good chess engine (and it also works with WinBoard) - it has an Elo rating of 2608 - which means that if it was a human, it would be one of the top 500 players in the world. SteveBaker (talk) 05:38, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Are there any handicapped chess engines for the rest of us? Mine has levels but the computer still wins. I was thinking one where the engine makes random mistakes. Julia Rossi (talk) 08:15, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Sure. I'm fairly certain that all of the available engines have a way to do that. Mostly they have the feature there to speed up play. Sometimes it can take the computer a long time to figure out the best move when playing its strongest game. The "Deep Blue" computer that beat Kasparov so famously had all sorts of special hardware and was a massive mainframe computer...a typical PC can probably play that well - but it might take a week to make a move!

But the programmers don't dumb them down by making them make random mistakes - they simply limit the number of turns the computer looks ahead and perhaps also limit the number of promising board positions that it examines more deeply at each step. This makes the computer play more like a less skilled human player would...it's more satisfying to win by 'out-thinking' your opponent than by taking advantage of a single stupid mistake. Another way to dumb down the computer is to limit the size of it's "openings" database so it doesn't simply play like a grand master for the first few moves by looking up all the other games that people won that started out that way.

Of course if you're continually losing - even on the 'dumbest' settings - then you probably just need to practice some more! SteveBaker (talk) 13:32, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Indeed! Thanks Steve, for your helpful answer, I'm on it. :) Julia Rossi (talk) 21:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

College football

Current African American quarterbacks in college football—Preceding unsigned comment added by 4.43.65.254 (talk • contribs)

What about them? If you look at all of college football (Div IA, IAA, II, III and NAIA), there are literally hundreds of them. Even in Division IA (can't bring myself to use the rediculous new name), there are probably dozens. What is your question about them? --Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:39, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

If you required a name of a current black quarterback in college, then Juice Williams of Illinois.--droptone (talk) 12:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Or Russell Wilson at NC State or Tyrod Taylor at VaTech or a whole bunch of others... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 14:03, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Daryll Clark at Penn State was under-appreciated this year. But Droptone is right, Juice Williams was definitely the most popular in 1A.NByz (talk) 19:36, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Here is a very extensive list of both current and historical black D-I quarterbacks. -Elmer Clark (talk) 21:48, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Relationship of Siblings

"Jacks" parents divorced and his dad married "Jacks" mother's sister. Two more sons were born during the second marriage. What would be the correct genealogical method to categorize the relationship between "Jack" and the two brothers?Ilprairie (talk) 06:24, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

• Besides half-brothers, they'd also be cousins. - 131.211.211.5 (talk) 08:10, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

131 is correct; Jack and the other two boys (Mack and Zack) share a grandparent (the parent of the mother and her sister) and so are cousins. I'd say the half-sibling relationship, through the boys' father, is a closer one than cousin, though. Tangentially, the article on I'm My Own Grandpa managed not to include the lyrics. --- OtherDave (talk) 13:55, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

We had a similar situation in my family. Two of my mom's brothers each married a mother and daughter. That made the older brother both uncle and (step)-grandfather to his younger brothers children. To be WAY confusing, the younger brother's kids call the older brother "grandpa" and my grandmother (i.e. the mother of BOTH brothers) "grandma". Of course, that also made my grandmother both the "grandparent" and "greatgrandparent" of the same children. These kids are both my first cousins (unremoved) and my first cousins once removed, at the same time. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 14:00, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

For a similar situation in popular culture, see I'm My Own Grandpa -- 128.104.112.113 (talk) 22:11, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Trans-Canda-Highway Toronto

1. How come the Trans-Canada-Highway doesn't go through Toronto, Canada's largest City, but goes through small virtually unknown villages? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.247.0.42 (talk) 14:19, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know about this highway in particular, but the general reason is that local traffic in those cities would slow down people who are just trying to drive straight through. Thus, the main highway bypasses major cities and a spur or loop connects the main highway to the big cities. (Those spurs or loops do still get bogged down with traffic at rush hour, but the main highway remains clear.) A secondary reason is that it's easier to obtain land for the highway far from major cities. StuRat (talk) 15:02, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I would suspect that it is because Toronto is located deep in southern Ontario, well off the east-west route across Canada. In order to pass through Toronto, the Trans-Canada Highway would approach Toronto along the shore of Lake Ontario. (Looking at the current map, I'd guess that you'd head southwest on Highway 35 from the existing Trans-Canada in Peterborough, and follow Highway 401 west into Toronto.) On reaching Toronto (from the east), the new route would then have to take a sharp right turn north in order to get around Lake Huron and Georgian Bay (not to mention the U.S. state of Michigan). It would lengthen the route by at least a couple of hundred kilometers. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 15:29, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

There is another important reason. Quebec and Ontario both have large and extensive provincial highway networks (the Quebec Autoroutes and the 400-seriesKings Highway respectively). The western provinces lack these extensive road networks, so there was a much more pressing need for a uniform long-distance route. In Quebec, Autoroute 20 and in Ontario, Highway 401 already serve these purposes. Canadian federal services tend to focus on the western provinces rather than on Quebec and Ontario; as the population density of those provinces means that they are more likely to provide their own services; for example the RCMP doesn't provide provincial level law enforcement in Ontario (where the OPP handles it) or in Quebec (where the SQ does). Canada, like the US, is a federal system, which means that, being a seperation of powers between federal and provincial governments, there are jursidictional issues as to why some things occur one way in some provinces but not in others... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 21:11, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Looking at the tiny map in our Trans-Canada Highway article, it looks like the southernmost branch goes closest to Toronto near the town of Sunderland, Ontario, approximately 100 km away. StuRat (talk) 22:38, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

It sort of does, since Yonge Street eventually connects to it. That is, you can drive from the edge of Lake Ontario all the way to the end of the TCH without really leaving the road. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:54, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

If you're driving across Canada, you only have a few choices for the 24-hour drive across Ontario. One of them is Highway 7, which actually joins Highway 12 a little north of Sunderland (10 minutes north of Saintfield, where I used to live!) and heads north to meet Hwy. 11 / Yonge St. north of Lake Simcoe, thence to North Bay and the big trek through Northern Ontario, where all the trucks go. The other choice is to follow Hwy 17 up the Ottawa River valley, through North Bay and Sudbury, over to the Soo, then all the curvy way around the shore of Lake Superior, up and down some pretty impressive hills. Those are your choices, there ain't no more.

In any case, the Trans-Canada highway was made for driving across Canada, so there's no need for the detour down to Toronto. And as noted, southern Ontario had a well-developed road network long before the TCH. Franamax (talk) 02:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

How much money does a Russian Citizen need to have on them when visiting the United Kingdom?

Hello, I was wondering if anybody could advise me how much money a Rusian Citizen needs to be able to show at border control in order to be allowed to visit Britain on a Visitors Visa? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Chrissie11000 (talk • contribs) 17:51, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I suggest you contact the relevant authority to enquire (details here). From my interpretation of what it says on that site (which could easily be wrong), you shouldn't need to show actual cash, but you may need to show you have access to sufficient funds for your visit (a bank statement, for example - you'll have had to show the same evidence when applying for your visa, just have that with you). --Tango (talk) 18:12, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

The British embassy in Moscow should be your first point of contact - address here. As Tango said, I doubt you would need to show cash (though you will need to pay the Visa fee), but evidence of your intent to return home to Russia (eg. a return plane ticket) and sufficient funds to support your stay is usually all that is needed. Astronaut (talk) 21:31, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Josh sticks

I would like to know if josh sticks are harmfull to breath in especially for children? I know if they were harmfull they would proberly not be sold but if that was the case then cigarettes would not be sold too. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.235.138.149 (talk) 19:16, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd have thought it most unlikely that joss stick smoke would not have carcinogenic substances in it. I do not know that for certain. If so, they pose a risk to anything around them that breathes. I don't know of any work that's been done to quantify the risk. --Tagishsimon (talk) 19:47, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Smoke in general is not a good thing to breathe, with the cancer risk (see polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) being one reason, but far from the only one (see particulate and carbon monoxide). On the other hand everyone breathes some smoke — you have to keep these things in perspective. For me personally, I would not expose myself to it on a regular basis (and certainly wouldn't want it around kids on a regular basis) but it wouldn't keep me from going into the home of someone who used it on an occasional basis. That's just my personal risk assessment and is not based on any specific knowledge of this particular kind of smoke. --Trovatore (talk) 22:05, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't know of any studies related to medical effects of incense on children. In most things moderation is a key. It is almost certain that an excess of incense would be bad for small children. I can't comment on the risk of a low key usage. Steewi (talk) 00:24, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

Moderation and ventilation. More at joss sticks. Julia Rossi (talk) 08:11, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

From our incense article: "Research carried out in Taiwan in 2001 linked the burning of incense sticks to the slow accumulation of potential carcinogens in a poorly ventilated environment by measuring the levels of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (including benzopyrene) within Buddhist temples. The study found gaseous aliphatic aldehydes, which are carcinogenic and mutagenic, in incense smoke."--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:31, 5 December 2008 (UTC)

There was a story several years ago about a family that burned all sorts of incense and candles that they'd imported from who-knows-where over a period of maybe 10 years. When their kids started having educational difficulties, they were tested for lead poisoning (a common cause of their particular learning problems) and found to have dangerous levels of the stuff in their bodies. When their house was tested, it was discovered that every surface and crevice of the place had been coated with a fine layer of dust that contained lead and a number of other toxic heavy metals that had been deposited there by smoke settling out from burning all of these things over such a long time. The shocker was that the cost of cleaning up the toxic mess was so great that the house had to be demolished - and worse still, their insurance company wouldn't cover them for the cost. Candles with lead in them are now banned in the USA - but apparently, not from incense, joss-sticks or other things like that...also, many candles imported from around the world are not properly tested for lead and other heavy metals which are often used to make the flame burn more consistently. (Google 'lead candle wick' for a ton of references on this kind of thing).

Consequently, I strongly advise against burning ANYTHING like that indoors except perhaps on very special occasions. We get enough crap in our lungs as it is - you don't need to add to it.

SteveBaker (talk) 13:21, 5 December 2008 (UTC)