Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2007 September 2

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[edit] September 2

[edit] Maurizio Giuliano

At which age had Maurizio Giuliano visited all countries in the world? A.Z. 00:28, 2 September 2007 (UTC)


It looks like he was 23.-Erin —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.147.68.58 (talk) 01:07, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Why does it look like that? Do you have a reference? A.Z. 19:52, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Reference [3] in his article says, inter alia: "British-Italian Maurizio Giuliano has announced he has broken the record to become the youngest person ever to visit all 192 of the world's independent countries. Giuliano, 23, said he chose Suriname as the last country he would visit because it is the only country in Latin America where Dutch is the official language."  :) -- JackofOz 05:25, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Thank you, Jack. I edited the article to include that information. A.Z. 05:33, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Don't mention it, A.Z. -- JackofOz 05:35, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Switching arms

In one of our articles about WWII Japanese POW Camps war crimes (sorry, I can't remember which one), it said that the Japanese cut off both arms of test subjects and re-attached them on different sides of their bodies. Did this work? Were the patients able to move/use their arms? Thanks. Acceptable 00:53, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure we would have the proper technology today to do that in a way that would allow full use of arms (matching nerves, but backwards?), and so I am practically certain it would not have worked in the 1940s either. --24.147.86.187 01:25, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I once saw on TV a man who had had both arms mutilated in an accident, and ended up with his left hand grafted to his right arm (or v.v.) because those were the parts they had to work with. He was able to write with it. – The first successful reattachment of a severed body part (a boy's fingertip) was in the Sixties, I believe. Ah, microsurgery says 1963. —Tamfang 07:52, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I adjusted the indentation on the next few entries so that Dismas would not seem to be responding to me, 'cause I certainly was not referring to Unit 731. —Tamfang 06:37, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I have taken to adjusting misleading indentation at will. --Sean 14:45, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
You're probably referring to Unit 731. Dismas|(talk) 09:46, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I really don't see how would grafting your left hand to your right hand would work, they are chiral so no matter how you put it a left hand is a left hand... But yeah, the OP is probably referring to Unit 731 and many other inhumane experiments done on humans (most of little scientific value). --antilivedT | C | G 21:56, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Agreed, their "experiments" sound more like the type of things serial killers do, like Jeffery Dahmer drilling holes into the brains of his victims to try to control their minds. StuRat 04:26, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Moon anomalies

Is it true that NASA airbrushes moon anomalies from their photos before releasing them to the public like it says in this video?[1] --124.254.77.148 02:06, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I wouldn't be surprised if NASA did clean up some scratches, dust and pixel anomalies from their pics, since they're largely irrelevant and technical errors. But the claims that NASA is hiding extraterrestrial UFO evidence from the public is pretty much bullshit. — Kieff | Talk 02:34, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Oh jeez. The first shot of the moon they show - with a peak white and utter black square...notice how the squares are exactly aligned to the raster. They are so huge - and on the earth-side of the moon - that you'd easily be able to see them with an amateur telescope. Look at those big "airbrushed out towers" - now look at the lighting on the nearby craters. Ask yourself "Where would the shadow of that tower fall?" - now look - is that part airbrushed out? No! It's not. So there never was a tower there. What was actually smudged out? Maybe alignment marks from the camera - I don't know. But for sure it wasn't a tower. Also, if you wanted to hide something from the public then (a) you'd do a much better job of painting them out than that or (b) you'd simply not publish that photo - it would be easier to claim that the data got corrupted or something like that. How come these structures are not airbrushed out (or visible) on the Russian photos of the back side of the moon? Those "domes" are a common optical illusion when a crater is lit from an unexpected direction. This is typical nut-job conspiracy theory. Nothing interesting here. SteveBaker 03:14, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Moasicking of multiple images of the Earth's surface routinely involves a degree of "smudging" and other manipulations in order to create what appears to be a seamless image. I can't say that this particular example is or isn't something like that, just that such post-processing of imagery, especially in mosaics, is very common. Pfly 03:35, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Yes - I agree - that is a common cause - but from the placement of those smudges (at least as portrayed in the video - which I don't trust) suggests it's not that. The various L-shaped smudges look a lot like blurred out cropmarks to me. As a general rule in photo-interpretation, anything that's aligned perfectly with the image raster is a prime candidate for being some kind of an artifact of the camera, the film or the way it's processed...and all of the things presented in this video are aligned to the raster. But when you look at those L-shaped things - then look at the nearby craters - you can see that the light from the sun was coming from behind and slightly to the right of the camera. Hence if these really were mile-high towers, there should be long shadows from the base of each tower heading out to the top-left corner of the image...and there aren't. There aren't even blurred-out regions where some 'NSA' person had painted the shadow out. It's just obvious...as are pretty much all of the other lunar conspiracy nuts out there. Sometimes I wish we could set the nut-jobs who say NASA never went to the moon loose with the other nut-jobs who claim that NASA hid the evidence of the lunar bases hidden there. That way they could argue amongst themselves and leave the rest of us to get on with something important. SteveBaker 17:22, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Hey Canadians!

What do you call a drugstore in Canada? IIRC, it is called a drugstore or pharmacy but I do not know for sure. This relates to the Wikipedia article for Dispensing chemist or druggist -- it says: A dispensing chemist will usually operate from a pharmacy or chemist's shop, usually abbreviated to "the chemist's" in English speaking nations, especially the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. The United States uses the term drugstore or pharmacy.

But it does not say what term Canadians use for where they get their pharmaceutical goods. So what it is, for addition to the article? -- Guroadrunner 06:25, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Drugstore or pharmacy. Drugstore is more colloquial and pharmacy is more official, but they're both used. And "Chemist" is never used. Flyguy649 talk contribs 06:30, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Thanks - does this apply to English Canada or also Quebec? Guroadrunner 06:45, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Actually, we don't say "the chemist's" in Australia. It's just "the chemist".  :) -- JackofOz 07:08, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm a Quebec francophone and I've never heard any anglophone say "chemists". For what it's worth I hear "pharmacy" more often than "drugstore" but I don't qualify as a reliable source. It may well be that "pharmacy" is used more often in Quebec than in the rest of Canada because "pharmacie" is the French term. But again,

good luck on backing this up with any sort of reference... Pascal.Tesson 07:36, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks for the input. Guroadrunner 12:02, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
To me, a drugstore is a convenience store with a pharmacy counter. The pharmacy is the part of the store that dispenses medication. -- Mwalcoff 23:35, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
The automatic phone service on a local (Canadian) Shopper's Drug Mart directs callers to "press 1 for the pharmacy; press 2 for cosmetics . . .". Bielle 02:29, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree with the above posts. The term "drugstore" is sometimes used to refer to the entire buildings, as a pharmacy not only contains drugs, but also items such as deodorants, foods, magazines, etc... The term "pharmacy" is used to refer to the specific portion of the store that deals with prescription drugs. Acceptable 02:41, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

In my usage (in Canada), "pharmacy" is just a fancy name for a drugstore. I don't have any term for the part of the store where the pharmacist dispenses prescription drugs. --Anonymous, 05:40 UTC, September 3, 2007.
I've always called that "the back of the drugstore"! Adam Bishop 06:25, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
You hear both pretty much interchangably here. Trekphiler™ 04:58, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] When was the wikipedia reference desk launched?

When was the Wikipedia reference desk launched first? Whose idea was it? How can I learn more about the history of the reference desk? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 156.56.174.132 (talk) 15:46, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Well according to the archive the first post was on 07-11-01 as to the history I'm not quite sure about that. Whispering 17:04, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Reference desk is about library reference desks (in general) and only refers to this ref desk by linking to it. Not sure if there is enough to tell about it to warrant an article. All one can say,a part from when it started, is how it works, and that is outlined at the top of this page. Well, maybe that one is supposed to first look things up in the encyclopedia and only if the answer is not there, then one can ask it here and then (here it comes) the resulting info should be added to the encyclopedia. That last thing is not done enough. I must admit that I don't do it too often either and one reason is that it is often interpretation (aka POV or OR) and that should not be in the encyclopedia. DirkvdM 17:41, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
I would like to learn more about the reference desk history as well. One bad thing about forgetting history is that this makes some people assume that the current status of things is somehow inherently good, which it often isn't. Knowing how things became the way they are may cause those people to realize that things could easily have happened differently, and make them not feel afraid to change the current status. I believe that, when it started, this "reference desk" had another name, but I'm not sure where I read it nor which name it was. It was probably at the reference desk talk page. A.Z. 17:48, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
This is an interesting page to look at, which suggests that User:Magnus Manske would be a good person to ask. Skittle 19:31, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Related thread here. I didn't remember that I had asked that before on this reference desk... A.Z. 19:37, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Thank you! That was very timely, informative, and helpful. 156.56.174.134 22:32, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

It apparently used to be called Wikipedia help desk (he discovers, after tracing things around a bit). The earliest edit available in a history is from November 2001, but I bet it is a little earlier than that, because that edit has other edits in it (though the "January 11, 2001" edit is not correct; it is from 2002, if you look at the history. If it were from 2001 it would have been added in practically the first day of Wikipedia, but that does not seem to be right). Amusingly one of the first questions was from Wikipedia "co-founder" Larry Sanger, with the amusing edit summary of "I've gotta know: why do dogs eat other dogs' poop?". Well, at least we know it has always been the way it currently is... --24.147.86.187 02:14, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I'm astounded that Magnus Manske is still so active, given he was around at the beginning. Hmmm, and with the user turnover being what it is, I wonder how long it will be before nobody is around who feels a little thrill at seeing that Larry Sanger asked that question. Already, Magnus Manske's 'sorry Larry' on his own page looks odd. I'm afraid I can't view the links you gave, 24. Is it just a temporary problem, or just a problem for me? Skittle 11:53, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Whoa! What looks like happened is that User:MCB saw the links given above by 24 and deleted the article completely, removing their history from public view and making the tracing of the early history of this page, and Wikipedia, harder. It also possibly renders the early archive a GFDL problem. This happened today, making it likely that this question and answer prompted it. If I were into conspiracy theories, I would mention people being gradually removed from official photographs... :o Skittle 11:57, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Yeah, that's very odd. Anyway it was a pretty innocuous list of questions from various users. It didn't even have the Wikipedia: or User: namespaces at that point. Odd that it was deleted, it wasn't doing any harm... --24.147.86.187 15:42, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Flying

After being in a plane today i was just wondering about certain things.

1. Even though it was a cloudless day when i took off, within minutes the ground was obscured by thick fog, I've noticed this before as well. Are there clouds which cant be seen from below but can from above or is it all just coincidence?

2. When I looked out the window and up words, the sky was quite dark, almost like it was dusk, but around the plane was still very bright, I had to put on sunglasses to look down due to glare. This was between 10 and 2 in the day. why was this?

3. I've been told that one may not use the toilets in a plane when it is on land, even if its parked with no immediate prospect of moving because it all goes straight out of the plane and would end up on the runway/parking spot. Is this true? It doesn't seem likely that Human excrement is just released to fall down. I would also imagine there would be problems with pressurisation.194.125.178.223 17:46, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

1. A "cloudless" day doesn't necessarily mean it's clear. Fog or haze may have been present; it's not really noticed as much from ground level as it is from 3-4,000 ft... trust me! Otherwise it seems like a coincidence.
2. Depends on how high you were, but I don't really have much of an answer or explanation for that unless it was clouds or something.
3. I've heard that too, and that's false as far as I know. You are free to utilize the lavatories as you wish and said excerement will remain in a holding tank until such time that it is removed.
Pilotguy 17:54, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
  • Sounds like the answer to #1 and #2 is the same -- fog. Some light that hits the fog bounces upward, so if you're below the fog on the ground, it's darker than it would be on a clear day, and if you're in the air above the fog, it's brighter than it would be on a clear day. --M@rēino 18:32, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Regarding the #3 (lavatories), I suspect that myth was carried over from passenger trains, which often do simply dump the excrement on the tracks. For obvious reasons the lavatories are closed while the train is in the station. Plasticup T/C 18:33, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Number 2: The sky is actually just air lit by sunlight. In higher altitudes less air is left between the observer and the black background of cosmos and the sky is less bright. Objects flying above most of the air are still lit by the sunlight and appear in full brightness. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.187.25.151 (talk) 20:01, 2 September 2007 (UTC)
Agree but would add that it's not the air itself which is lit by sunshine, but particulate matter in the air. There are far more particles in the air near the ground than higher up, since most particles come from wind acting on the ground, fire, or from exhaust/smokestacks. These particles mostly settle out before reaching the upper atmosphere. There are a few things which can cause large numbers of particles in the upper atmosphere, though, such as nuclear weapons and large volcanic eruptions. StuRat 04:10, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Mall and Filling

What does this sentence suppose to mean? I read from On Writing: The Memoir of the Craft:

"...writing such fluffery is something you'll never do in the actual mall-and-filling-station world". -- Stephen King

--70.252.3.139 20:46, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Mall and filling station? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.252.3.139 (talk) 20:45, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

See Shopping mall and filling station. Both are in many ways symbolic of America in the 20th Century. DuncanHill 20:58, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

In other words, he's just talking about everyday life. But Stephen King is American: why would he use the British phrase "filling station"? Is this perhaps a British edition of the book, where they might have translated the vocabulary? --Anonymous, 05:45 UTC, September 3, 2007.

filling station is a common term in at least some of the rebellious colonies. —Tamfang 06:21, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
And I've never heard "filling station" used by Brits or Australians - it's a petrol station. FiggyBee 07:52, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Or more commonly, a "service station". -- JackofOz 12:58, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
Or sometimes, colliquially, "garridge" / "garahhhgzh" (even if the petrol station doesn't actually offer any garage/repair services. Agreed about "filling station". While everyone would understand such usage, it's not used in the UK. --Dweller 13:23, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I always thought "mall-and-filling-station world" referred to the traditional market for certain populist writers, as malls and filling stations are two of the main retailers of their work. More fruity writing (fluffery) would not be found in such books; King is saying that such a style of writing would not be found in the work of populist writers. Neil ム 15:44, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
So, do Americans commonly buy books at "filling stations"? I just can't imagine going to a kiosk to pay for my petrol and thinking "hmm, while I'm here, I'll buy a paperback". --Dweller 06:14, 4 September 2007 (UTC)
I'd say no, but perhaps magazines? jeffjon 15:31, 4 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Variation of calorie count / intensity on exercise machines

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have recently resumed the addition of cardiovascular exercise on my daily (5-6 days / week) weight lifting workout. However I have noticed that in a low intensity 15 minutes session of elliptical (cross trainer), I burn an estimate of 260~ calories. For the same period of time on a stationary bike (high intensity - my legs are almost literally burning), the calorie count is a mere 120~ ish. The calorie count is doubled on the cross trainer with very limited effort on my part, does this mean the aforementioned machine is better for burning off calories or is it blatantly less accurate than the other machines ?

Sincerely, Matt714 23:10, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

I'd say you figured it out. Whatever assumptions they used for the two devices, they were different. I'd be more inclined to believe the lower values. StuRat 03:58, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
I suppose the assumption by the manufacturers would be that with the cross-trainer you're using your whole body, but just your legs on the bike. Thus using more of your body = using more calories. Which one is more correct is a bit of a guess, but I agree with StuRat that I'd tend to err on the side of caution, i.e., the lower values. What would be interesting would be to compare the estimates given for a cross-trainer and a stationary bike both made by the same manufacturer, if such a thing exists. --jjron 07:50, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pharmacies

It is extremely rare nowadays to find in North America a pharmacy (chemist's) that's just a pharmacy. Pharmacies are located in convenience stores (where you can also buy makeup, laundry detergent, greeting cards, etc.), supermarkets or megastores like Wal-Mart. You'd have to go back to the 50s or something to find a lot of pharmacies dedicated exclusively to pharmacy.

So how come pharmacies in Europe still tend to be just pharmacies? How come the idea of a pharmacy in a bigger store hasn't caught on over there? -- Mwalcoff 23:48, 2 September 2007 (UTC)

Things have changed recently, in the Uk at least. Boots The Chemists is essentially a large store now, and not solely a chemist. Also Sainsburys, Tesco, Asda and Morrisons all have instore pharmacies in their larger stores, as standalone pharmacies are being slowly squeezed out. Rockpocket 02:32, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
It's probably for legal reasons. In Australia, it's still illegal for supermarkets to sell anything much more potent than paracetamol. FiggyBee 07:55, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
That acetaminophen for us. Rmhermen 22:41, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Legal reasons in Scandinavia at least. In Sweden, pharmacies are a state monopoly, and in Finland and Denmark, the government regulates the pharmacy business very strictly - only individual, trained and licenced pharmacists may own and operate pharmacies. In Norway it's less regulated, apparently.--Rallette 10:24, 3 September 2007 (UTC)

Pharmacies are regulated in Canada as well and only licensed pharmacists can dispense drugs. Any store that has a pharmacy, whether it's a drugstore like Shoppers Drug Mart or another type of retailer like Wal-Mart or Loblaws, will have licensed pharmacists to staff it. - Eron Talk 12:41, 3 September 2007 (UTC)
In the US, following the lead of Medicare, the insurance companies pay the pharmacy on the order of $3 plus the 'average wholesale cost' to fill a prescription. That's not enough to keep the lights on. Gzuckier 16:23, 4 September 2007 (UTC)