Revision as of 03:41, 26 May 2015

• Computing
• Entertainment
• Humanities
• Language
• Mathematics
• Science
• Miscellaneous
• Archives

• WP:RD/H

Main page: Help searching Misplaced Pages

How can I get my question answered?

• Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
• Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
• Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
• Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
• Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
• Note:
  • We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
  • We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
  • We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
  • We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.

How do I answer a question?

Main page: Misplaced Pages:Reference desk/Guidelines

• The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.

• Teahouse
• Help desk
• Village pump
• Help manual

May 21

How to pronounce the "v." in court cases?

Is Roe v. Wade pronounced "Roe vee Wade" or "Roe versus Wade"? My other car is a cadr (talk) 03:01, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

I've heard it pronounced both ways in various news stories. Dismas| 03:14, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Yup... it's pronounced both ways. Blueboar (talk) 03:28, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

What Blueboar said. Lawyers and those involved in legal fields are more apt to use "Roe vee," but either works. GregJackP Boomer! 03:33, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

In at least some countries it's also pronounced as "'n", meaning "and". I was talking to a niece of mine who's a lawyer in Canada just the other day and noticed her using this pronunciation. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 04:31, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

In England, lawyers would refer to the case as 'Roe and Wade'. Sometimes you get a case with multiple defendants - for example, R. v. Dudley and Stephens - which is referred to by the name of the defendants only - ie. 'Dudley and Stephens'.

How non-lawyers would refer to such a case is up to them; there is no right or wrong answer. 81.141.215.133 (talk) 06:32, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

I remember when Kramer vs. Kramer was a current movie and a frequent topic of conversation. A friend of mine was a first year law student at the time, and whenever the movie was mentioned, he would be certain to pointedly call it "Kramer AND Kramer", which always stopped the rest of us in our tracks. He, with his decades of legal training, would explain that that was the one and only correct way to say "vs". Well, maybe so in Commonwealth countries, but not so in the USA. -- Jack of Oz 07:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

In the UK, the conventional system is to say "and" for civil cases: Rylands v Fletcher = "Rylands and Fletcher", and to say "against" for criminal cases: R v Wallace = "The King against Wallace". (Geoffrey Rivlin (2012), Understanding the Law (6th ed), Oxford, p 21). Tevildo (talk) 08:27, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Although criminal lawyers generally just refer to the case by the name of the defendant. So to use your example, R. v. Wallace would usually be referred to (other than in formal settings) simply as Wallace. (The practice mentioned by 81.141.215.133 above is broader than just cases with two defendants.) It can sometimes be difficult, without context or knowledge of the case in question, to know whether a case referred to in speech as "Smith and Jones" is the civil case of Smith v. Jones or the criminal case of R. v. Smith and Jones. Proteus (Talk) 11:53, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

@Tevildo and everyone else who knows about these things: The UK civil terminology has from time to time become contentious at Jarndyce and Jarndyce and there has been a RM at Talk:Jarndyce and Jarndyce#Requested move. Could someone supply a reference to a reliable source for the terminology at this article and otherwise help out? Thincat (talk) 14:42, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

User:JackofOz, whilst your law student friend ("with his decades of legal training" in "first year law") might have substituted "and" for "versus", it certainly isn't how "vs" is pronounced. Aside from that, the name of the film is properly pronounced however its title is officially marketed, which was quite definitely "Kramer versus Kramer", irrespective of what the 'proper' parlance might be in legal circles. So your pedantic friend was just wrong.--Jeffro77 (talk) 10:13, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

As we told him at the time. But he knew better, and there was no telling him. -- Jack of Oz 11:41, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

It's and in England. That's how I was taught at law school; and in criminal cases R is pronounced The Queen. It is short for Regina because crimes are officially prosecuted by the Crown. Hence, R. v Brown becomes The Queen and Brown.149.254.224.222 (talk) 09:34, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Of course, R is sometimes pronounced The King. DuncanHill (talk) 10:49, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Visa Waiver Program

The visa waiver program seems to favours Europeans. Previous US visa policy were openly racist when they favoured Europeans. So is the current European favouring eligibility also due to racism or something else? 78.144.251.38 (talk) 07:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The article tells us that (after markup-stripping):

The criteria for designation as program countries are specified in Section 217 (c) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (Title 8 U.S.C. § 1187). The criteria stress passport security and a very low nonimmigrant visa refusal rate: not more than 3% as specified in Section 217 (c)(2)(A) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as ongoing compliance with the immigration law of the United States.

If you ask whether this is due to racism, it seems to me that you're inviting mere opinions. Are you asking whether these apparently impartial standards are actually interpreted in a racist way? -- Hoary (talk) 08:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

According to this article, Qatar, Oman and South Africa should have been offered the program. They are more stable and employed than many listed European countries. This makes me wonder if their majority African and Asian ethnicity has something to do with it as it had in the past. Is my racism-theory correct? 78.144.251.38 (talk) 09:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

We do not answer requests for opinions. Including opinions as to whether your theories are correct. AndyTheGrump (talk) 09:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Please provide citations for your claims. The source you linked to doesn't say "Qatar, Oman and South Africa should have been offered the program". It simply mentions that these 3 countries meet one of the criteria. Nil Einne (talk) 13:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Since you say its racist, why would you want to go there anyways? Almost a moot point methinks. btw- many CARICOM countries, for example, don't need visas in places such as the uk and even Switzerland.120.62.7.103 (talk) 12:00, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

America

What was the term for America before Vespucci and the European came over? Was there a unified term for the entire continental island (many traders did cross what are state borders today)? Of course all the tribes and societies have/had their own language, so they may be more than one term, if any.120.62.7.103 (talk) 12:02, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

If I'm not mistaken, Charles C. Mann covers this in his excellent book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. The answer is "nothing". The people who lived here before European contact had no common culture, and no common understanding of the entire planet, with concepts like "continents" and the like. They had ideas like "land" and "sea" and "sky", but concepts like "Europe" or "The Americas" did not exist for them in any meaningful way. --Jayron32 12:09, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Same, incidentally, for all the other continents. Note the anomaly when it comes to the notion of "Europe", though, which is a "continent" that is not actually a continent, geographically speaking. That by itself should give away who it was that did the naming. Btw, Vespucci did not discover America. He simply claimed to have been the first to identify that area as a new continent (as opposed to it being the eastern edge of Asia) and someone who apparently took his claim seriously used a Latin form of Vespucci's first name to designate that new part of the world. The use of a first name was a bit unusual (except for monarchs) but in hindsight it was a good choice: just imagine "the United States of Vespuccia (US of V)". Contact Basemetal here 12:51, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, except that the old world had a (to them) natural continental division: the Mediterranean Sea (lit. "The Center of the Earth"). From the Mediterranean point-of-view, you could divide the land into continents based on cardinal directions: Europe to the North, Asia to the East, and Africa to the south. The lack of a Western land upset their sense of symmetry, which is why some had to invent a "lost" continent, hence, Atlantis. The continent never existed, but the name for it persists today in the Atlantic Ocean. As far as they were concerned, each of those lands extended on from those direction in an indeterminate manner. The division between Europe and Asia had natural water boundaries (i.e. the Black Sea) as did Asia and Africa (the Red Sea). The lack of a convenient body of water beyond the Black Sea to divide Asia from Europe certainly upset that original plan, but at the time, it worked well for them. --Jayron32 13:06, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The people living in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans were unaware of other landmasses. In fact, individual societies were generally unaware of any lands more than about 1000 km from their own, so they did not have a concept of continents. Marco polo (talk) 13:24, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

They weren't aware of kilometers, either. ←Baseball Bugs carrots→ 15:05, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

They still aren't. Kilometers are French. Contact Basemetal here 15:54, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

No, kilomètres are French, kilometers are American. DuncanHill (talk) 16:02, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Canada has Natives and kilometres. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:20, May 21, 2015 (UTC)

And it refers to the Yupik as Inuit, which they aren't. --Trovatore (talk) 20:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Federally, yeah. But it also lets both groups largely disregard federal stuff, and officially call themselves anything. So there's a moral balance. Wait, no. Only "First Nations" get band governments. We're evil after all. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:36, May 22, 2015 (UTC)

See "Turtle Island (North America)".—Wavelength (talk) 21:12, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

No, that's not exactly the same thing, and I don't really like the phrasing in the article that it is the name for North America. Native American cosmogony is certainly not developed enough to recognize what a continent is. Turtle Island is merely the World Turtle concept as manifested in the Northeastern United States. It's the name for the world as opposed to this chunk of land. --Jayron32 21:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

At least I've had a longtime question answered: does "Turtle Island" mean island with turtles, island shaped like a turtle, island that is a turtle, or something else again? Each of these would be translated differently to at least some languages. —Tamfang (talk) 06:50, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Can or will formal language replace ordinary language in the literary arts?

According to philosophers, poetry and mathematics both seek truth and beauty. Moreover, these two disciplines operate under constrains of precision, rigidity and logical validity. This deep and intimate connection became the foundation of “mathematical poetry”.

This is an example of a minimalist mathematical poem by LeRoy Gorman entitled “The Birth of Tragedy”:

                                   (!+?)^2

Does mathematical poetry signal the literary turn to using formal or symbolic language in creative writing? Are there any critics to this kind of poetry?Rja2015 (talk) 15:30, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

No. --Jayron32 15:33, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

I don't know about criticizing that kind of poetry, but the St. Louis Poetry Center saw something wrong with that particular poet's language thirty years ago, because he came in second. But, as artists do, he didn't let it get him down and by 1990, he was big in Japan.

No on the first question. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:50, May 21, 2015 (UTC)

There are the best math poems, as decided by the (probably) esteemed critics at PoetrySoup.com. By binary logic, the rest are simply not the best. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:03, May 22, 2015 (UTC)

I have read all the poems included in that site's list of "best" math poems. All are execrable, as you'd expect from a site largely targetting doggerel-mongers. Some of Piet Hein's grooks express entertaining mathematical thoughts, but all are expressed in common language (either English or Danish). RomanSpa (talk) 17:38, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

This is one of those areas where "philosophers" have (as is very common) expressed themselves unclearly. Mathematicians are to a large extent concerned with statements that are "mathematically true" - that is, can be deduced from an agreed set of prior statements by a clear sequence of intermediate statements. A mathematical truth is often regarded by practitioners as beautiful if it is of great significance or generality, and/or has been deduced using a non-obvious sequence of intermediate statements, and/or tells us something unexpected or useful about the real world that the mathematics is being used to model. Poets, on the other hand, are not concerned that their statements are in any sense literally true, but seek to induce particular thoughts or states of mind in their audience through the use of language such as metaphor and simile, and such oral-language tools as assonance and rhyme. The "truth" of a poem is largely the affirmation or contradiction of pre-existing tendencies within the human mind, and is largely uninteresting except as an examination of mental states. When a poet writes "Proud the hull and dark the prow, of sweat and steel it forged..." he is not giving true information about ship construction, and when he writes "North the fulmar through the smoke, the ship in silence led" he is not suggesting that ship navigation be based on bird behaviour: he is seeking to evoke a state of mind that is "true" in its emotional satisfaction. To put it another way, the "truth" that mathematics is concerned with is different from the "truth" that poetry is concerned with. It isn't meaningful to compare the two. RomanSpa (talk) 18:09, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Thomas Harcourt's kidney

According to John Aubrey, when Thomas Harcourt (our article is at Thomas Whitbread), was executed and his bowels thrown into the fire, "a butcher's boy standing by was resolved to have a piece of his Kidney which was broyling in the fire", later it was in the possession of one "Roydon, a brewer in Southwark". Aubrey says he saw it, and it was absolutely petrified. Do we know if the kidney has survived? Is it now a relic? Where is it? DuncanHill (talk) 15:41, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

This review of 1973 Review of the Patrick Garland/Roy Dotrice's one-man play about the life of Aubrey (noted in our article) claims that among the props used in the play are "the actual jawbone of Thomas More and the .petrified kidney of Sir Thomas Harcourt". No idea if the report is accurate, but if it is, then the kidney still existed in 1973. No idea how it, and More's jawbone, were obtained to be used in the play. But it's a lead. --Jayron32 15:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Broiling a kidney petrifies it? How does that work? I think I've eaten broiled kidneys, though not human ones. Or was it liver? Contact Basemetal here 16:01, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The obvious explanation is that it was a giant kidney stone, such as this 2.5 pound specimen: . The fire would merely removed the remaining flesh. StuRat (talk) 16:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Flesh will petrify just fine. Mummification, for example. So long as it is kept free from the sort of microorganisms that would eat it, flesh can survive almost indefinitely; certainly a few centuries is not unreasonable. --Jayron32 16:17, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, but you don't mummify something by "broyling in the fire", as described in the Q. StuRat (talk) 13:27, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Aubrey says "The wonder is, 'tis now absolutely petrified. But 'twas not so hard when he first had it. It being always carried in the pocket hardened by degrees, better than by the fire". Thanks for the Patrick Garland/Roy Dotrice lead - Unfortunately they are both dead, so I can't approach them for information. DuncanHill (talk) 16:21, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh how very silly of me, Roy Dotrice is not dead, I'm glad to say! DuncanHill (talk) 16:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Not entirely relevant, but here lies Grigori Rasputin's alleged penis. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:11, May 21, 2015 (UTC)

A detail of the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin

I'd have said the boundary between Minnesota and Wisconsin consists of part of the course of the St. Croix river going as far south as its confluence with the Mississippi River, and downstream from there it's the Mississippi River, and north of the point where the St. Croix forms the boundary it's a straight line going northward until, or almost until, it reaches the western extreme of Lake Superior.

Looking at this map a few miles southeast of Prescott, Wisconsin, I see the boundary appearing to leave the main channel of the Mississippi and following a narrower channel southwest of the main channel and rejoining the main channel about a half-mile downstream from there. Zooming in, it appears to be labeled "Big River". But the Big River is supposed to be a river in Wisconsin flowing into the Mississippi somewhere near there. This channel labeled "Big River" seems to be on the wrong side of the Mississippi to be a river in Wisconsin, and it looks like a channel a half-mile long rather than a river 13 miles long in Wisconsin. What exactly is happening here? Michael Hardy (talk) 21:59, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

Rivers change their courses but legal boundaries don't always follow. The border may be defined as the middle of the waterway as it existed on a certain date. Rmhermen (talk) 22:50, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

This sort of thing happens often along state boundaries defined (at the time the state's boundaries were first drawn) by the Mississippi River in particular. For most of its course, the Mississippi meanders over a broad floodplain, resulting in relatively frequent changes of position, especially before the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began working to stabilize the course of the river in the late 1800s. Marco polo (talk) 23:04, 21 May 2015 (UTC)

The principle is that when the river drifts gradually across its floodplain, the state border drifts with the river. When the river abandons it's old channel and completely cuts a new channel (see Meander cutoff for example), then the state border remains with the former channel. This has happened all over the place, and resulted in geographic oddities like Kaskaskia, Illinois (caused by river channel jumping) and the Kentucky Bend (caused by a drifting river channel which moved the border). --Jayron32 00:18, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

According to the linked article, the Kentucky bend was not formed by a "drifting river channel" but arose accidentally from the way the boundary was specified, similarly to Point Roberts, Washington. I'm not aware of any cases where a drifting channel formed that sort of anomaly (which certainly is not to say that there aren't any).

Another notable example of natural channel jumping is Carter Lake, Iowa, which since 1877 has been on the Nebraska side of the Missouri River. A similar example where the channel was moved artificially is Marble Hill, a part of the New York borough of Manhattan that's been on the Bronx side of the Harlem River since 1914. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 174.88.135.200 (talk) 04:10, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

No, when originally mapped it was contiguous with the rest of Kentucky. The New Madrid Earthquake caused the river channel to drift dramatically (without leaving its channel as in a cutoff). See and . Both sources cite the movement of the river channel caused by the earthquake as the reason for the bend. --Jayron32 04:16, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

In the second source, "Kentucky Bend" is written in capitals and small capitals, indicating a cross-reference. That is to page 491, where you will see the enclave explained as the result of a surveying error (which is what I should have said above, rather than referring to the original specification). It is, of course, possible that the earthquake moved the river far enough that, when the states agreed to use the surveyed line as the boundary, that decision created the enclave. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 20:56, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Further to this, check out this 1775 map of the river. If you mouse over the map, a gray scale icon appears and you can click "+" to enlarge, then click and drag to see the part you want. Unfortunately it's hard to relate the map to a modern one because so many place names have changed, but near the top you can see the confluence with the Ohio River. If you scan south from that point, you will see Wolf Island: see Wolf Island, Missouri. South of that the river makes an N-shaped double bend, where some islands are labeled "Sound Islands". That has got to be the Kentucky Bend, with New Madrid at the point where the map shows a "Cheponssea or Sound River" flowing into the Mississippi. (That river doesn't seem to exist today as shown on the map, but perhaps it's what Google Maps shows as Saint John Bayou, and the mapmaker mistook what direction it flowed from.) Anyway, if this interpretation is correct it means that while the New Madrid quakes may have altered the exact configuration of the Kentucky Bend, they clearly did not create it. --174.88.135.200 (talk) 23:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

None of the above appears to explain why that channel is labeled "Big River" when the Big River is supposed to be a river in Wisconsin that is a tributary of the Mississippi. Michael Hardy (talk) 04:37, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

It is possible that that's just an error in the Google Map—such errors are hardly unknown occurences. The USGS topographic map for the area does not have a label for that side channel, and I'm not seeing a "Big River" label on any online map other than the Google one. On the other hand "Big River" is an extremely common name in the U.S., and it's possible that someone calls that side channel Big River; but it's apparently not a name recognized by the U.S. government. (From the Google aerial image, it appears that the channel may be silting up and losing its connection with the Mississippi, turning into an oxbow lake.) Deor (talk) 11:37, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

It could even be an intentional error. Google only recently turned off a number of user submission features in Map Maker due to such intentional errors or misuse . (This allowed people to make changes on the map, I presume it include modifying names of features.) Nil Einne (talk) 19:44, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

May 22

Please identify this nasheed

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=551_1431627699 This is a video from Army of Conquest. I haven't been able to find the nasheed, and google deleted the youtube channel so I can't ask them either. Does anyone know the nasheed, or can an arabic speaker search the lyrics for me? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Radioactivemutant (talk • contribs) 05:03, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

City of London pub history

Does anyone know where online I'd be able to see anything about the histories of pubs in the City? I've discovered the Golden Fleece on Queen Street (51°30′48″N 0°5′33.5″W / 51.51333°N 0.092639°W / 51.51333; -0.092639), a block away from One New Change (which is apparently by the site of the pre-Blitz street "Old Change"), and I'm trying to figure out whether it could be the place of publication (or related to the place of publication) for Thomas Edwards' book The casting down of the last and strongest hold of Satan, which was "Printed by T.R. and E.M. for George Calvert, and are to be sold at the golden Fleece in the Old-Change, 1647". Nyttend (talk) 14:18, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

The London Encyclopaedia has some information about Old Change (p. 598). Londoners don't really talk about "blocks" as there is no regularity to our streets especially in the City. Queen Street is actually four junctions further down Cheapside from the site of Old Change (about two or three hundred yards) as you can see on the 1936 A to Z of London. New Change was built "a little to the east" of Old Change, which is now the site of a (rather ugly) sunken garden in the Festival of Britain style where I used to eat my sandwiches sometimes. So no, I don't think there's a connection as there are several pubs in between. Alansplodge (talk) 15:09, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Actually looking at a photograph of the Old Change garden, it doesn't look as bad as I remembered. Either I or the garden the garden or I must have mellowed with age. By the way, in 2011 there were 28 English pubs called the "Golden Fleece", so it's not a particularly rare name. Alansplodge (talk) 15:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

"Golden fleece" is a good name for any business, which is of course there to fleece you of your "gold". The only more appropriate British business name I can think of is the gambling group, Ladbroke. StuRat (talk) 16:10, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

It's a small world: the "Golden Fleece" website that the original question linked to is actually in Forest Gate some six or seven miles east of the City, overlooking Wanstead Flats in Epping Forest. My sister used to rent a flat nearby and I've had a few enjoyable pints there. Alansplodge (talk) 18:02, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

I originally had several "Golden Fleece" webpages open and closed all of the tabs, so when I went to ask the question, I apparently pulled up the wrong one. I think this is the right one. Nyttend (talk) 12:12, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

At the risk of sounding trite, yes there are lots of historic pub guides: a simple Google search on "history London pubs" brought up several online. Rather than recommend them to you, please have a look yourself. (The reason I'm doing this is because I'm quite a beer and pub fan and if I started looking through all these sites myself now, I'd miss the event I'd got planned for this evening!) --TammyMoet (talk) 18:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Can you give me some examples of ones that are reliable? I ran such a search, but the first reliable-looking one didn't show up until the seventh page of results, and much of the book isn't displayed. All I'm seeing otherwise are a mix of random popular websites, with a couple newspaper columns, and they're not reliable for seventeenth-century history. Nyttend (talk) 12:08, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Didn't realise you were writing an academic paper on this, I thought you were interested in visiting pubs! --TammyMoet (talk) 14:46, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Nope, sorry; I'm in the US, working on MARC cataloging a collection of 16th-through-20th-century books, and when I can't find an authority file for the publisher, I've been doing my best to add a free-text note connecting the publisher to something currently in existence. That's why I wanted something online; our print reference collection definitely won't have anything on the subject, and I doubt I could find anything relevant in print in any regional libraries. Nyttend (talk) 18:41, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Have you tried approaching the Museum of London? (or for that matter the https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/london-metropolitan-archives/Pages/default.aspx Metropolitan Archive?) ShakespeareFan00 (talk) 19:31, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

I've managed to trace the Golden Fleece at 8 Queen Street back as far as 1971 which given the short life span of many City pubs isn't bad going. In 1919, the same address was the registered offices of the London Coal Trade Clerks Association (a trades union) , but that doesn't preclude it being a pub as well. There is a mention of a pub called the "Golden Fleece" in the Post Office London Directory, 1843 (p. 122), at 3 Little Knightrider Street. Knightrider Street connected with Old Change at its southernmost end; however our article says that much of the street was demolished in the 1860s. Note also that this area was devastated by the Great Fire of London in 1666; however another pub in Knightrider Street, "The Horn", was rebuilt afterwards and is still in use as a pub today, although under a different name. This 1775 map shows how far away Old Change was from Queen Street, and Knightrider Street is partly shown on the western margin as "...riderS." Alansplodge (talk) 20:44, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Sniffle-less Žižek?

Has anyone come across audio/video of Slavoj Žižek with the sniffling removed? That should be technically feasible, shouldn't it? It's absolutely unbearable. It makes it impossible to concentrate on what the guy's saying. There's also his speech impediment, a kind of "bilateral lisp" (is that the correct term?) but I can deal with that. (If you don't know who/what I'm talking about: here and here, but you probably won't be able to help me then.) Contact Basemetal here 16:30, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

From a quick glance at his article, I'm not sure whether not being able to concentrate on what he's saying is a bug or a feature. --Trovatore (talk) 16:59, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Assuming he doesn't talk while sniffling, careful editing could mute the sound whenever he sniffled, without interfering with the words. However, you would lose any ambient sounds during each sniffle. Depending on the volume of those ambient sounds, the muting might be quite obvious. There are also more complex ways to try to remove the sniffles without the ambient noise, but that would require lots of work and expertise. StuRat (talk) 16:55, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Thanks. If this is something that would take a lot of work then it probably doesn't exist. I had Googled things like 'Zizek sniffling removed' etc. but nothing serious came up. He doesn't have the reputation of being a very profound thinker but, despite his sniffling, has gained some notoriety globally. I was curious what it was all about, but, because of that sniffling, never managed to sit through even a 5 mins video. Contact Basemetal here 17:41, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

• There are the infamous tampon commercials with a wheezing actress (1982) parodied here by SCTV, see minute 1:30. The real commercial was fixed to remove the breathing sounds after it became the subject of parody. μηδείς (talk) 17:24, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

• • Twice the same link. You did not provide the link for the parody. Contact Basemetal here 17:41, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

• • • Oops, sorry, Basemetal, sometimes cut doesn't always work on PC's for some reason; never have that issue with Macs. I have fixed the link above, and here it is again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN64UooGiXw. First there is a jean commercial and its parody, then the tampon commercial at 1:30 followed by the parody. Oh, and I looked, but I couldn't find the filtered version of the actual commercial where the wheezing goes away. μηδείς (talk) 18:07, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

• I have a solution to the problem of <CTRL> C not telling you if it worked or not. Do <CTRL> X, instead, followed by <CRTL> V. If the highlighted text disappears, then reappears, you have confirmation that it made it into the cut buffer. StuRat (talk) 22:10, 22 May 2015 (UTC)

Yes, Stu, that is actually what I did, and the text did disappear. In this case it was between browsers, so perhaps that was the specific issue. Nevertheless it has been my experience that with PC's running Windows 7 there's no guarantee the cut will take or that the paste will be the most recent cut. I've had this issue on multiple PC's running anything from XP to Windows 8, so I think its a Windows fault. I have never had this problem with a Mac, but mine is now 10 years old and I am not in a hurry to spend money to replace an Asus I bought in 2013 and love for just that problem. Of course it's embarrassing when you end up posting... well, you can imagine. μηδείς (talk) 04:01, 23 May 2015 (UTC)

Oh, crumbs, Žižek again. Can someone please think of the domo-kuns and upload a YouTube video entitled, I dunno, "Cultural Marxism for Dummies", consisting of <redacted> and <redacted> repeatedly hitting <redacted> over the head with paperback first editions of "The Sublime Object of Ideology"?--Shirt58 (talk) 15:20, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Been done. Some ... is repeatedly hitting ... over the ... though possibly not with a ... that will satisfy all .... Contact Basemetal here 15:55, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

It sounds like there's something very weird with your computer which few other people experience. Windows by default has only a single clipboard and no clipboard history. Certain applications like Office do have their own history but even if the application is running, this should generally only affect the application unless you majorly screw up the settings. You can install clipboard history applications, but if you did that, you should know about it unless the computer is managed by someone else which it doesn't sound like it is.

The point of all this is that if you cut something and it was successfully cut it's not possible to paste something else by default on Windows. So either you're running an application which is messing around with the clipboard, or you aren't actually cutting.

As StuRat said, cutting will generally give feedback that it worked, which was the point of StuRat's suggestion. The exceptions is something which can't be modified. In which case you should still know that there's no feedback (i.e. the content is still there). In fact with I think most applications cutting won't work with something which can't be modified. So "content is still there" does usually mean "cutting didn't work" whatever the reason.

Since you highlighted something, you could delete it instead of cutting but unless you have a very weird keyboard, or major hand motor problems, it should be very difficult to do this without noticing that you did so, when trying to cut using the keyboard. If you fail to push ctrl or it otherwise doesn't register, you should see the x which replaced the highlighted text. Even if you push space you should see the space if you are paying proper attention (and with most keyboards it isn't easy to push space anyway). And besides you'd have to not only push, but push space and fail to push x. Pushing backspace or delete will generally appear little different from a successful cut, but these would generally be even harder to push then space, plus again you'd need to fail to push the x.

Different browsers should generally irrelevant since the clipboard itself is a Windows function, unless the browser messes around with the clipboard in some way or doesn't know how to use a core Windows function. (The clipboard is part of Windows, but the application obviously has to know how to interact with it.) Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome should not have any problems using the clipboard properly without having installed weird plugins or something. I suspect Opera shouldn't either. No idea about other browsers although it would IMO be a silly or specialised browser that does anything like that by default.

(Certain web services like online document editing services have their own way of interacting with the clipboard, but this is even less likely to affect anything other than the service itself.

P.S. In a limited number of cases, you may get undesirable results if one application copies content formated in one way, and the other application can't handle that format properly. Although this will depend significantly on the interaction since many applications with such formatted content particularly text will include plain text and perhaps some other formats, as well. But in that case, you should simply get weird results rather than "cut one link but an older link appeared".

Nil Einne (talk) 19:24, 24 May 2015 (UTC)

Well, this is a bit off topic and stale, but in appreciation for your effort I will explain that while I did ctrl x from the address field, I didn't do ctrl v to see if it pasted back, as Stu suggested, which would have been determinative. I took the disappearance of the address after the ctrl x as indicating that the cut had taken. μηδείς (talk) 18:21, 25 May 2015 (UTC)

• Pages automatically checked for accidental language links
• Misplaced Pages resources for researchers
• Misplaced Pages help forums
• Misplaced Pages reference desk