Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2009 January 24

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January 24

Chaos Theory. Is this a croc, or what?

I moved this question over to the Science desk, where it's more at home and the answers are more likely to be thoroughly awesome. -- Captain Disdain (talk) 00:22, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - over here, we just have to say "No"! (I've replied on the science desk). SteveBaker (talk) 01:54, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

forwarding articles

Dear sirs;

Please explain how I can forward your articles or pages. I have "hotmail" as a server and they do not deal with "outlook express" which pops up with a right click.

Thank you...The novice, Mont Monaco

P.S. I searched but couldn't find an area where this question was presented. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mont monaco (talk • contribs) 04:04, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

It would be VASTLY better to email the URL of the page rather than the entire page itself. Aside from anything else, many pages use 'fair use' photographs that it might be illegal for you to copy. SteveBaker (talk) 04:10, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Not that I'd recommend emailing entire Wikipedia pages, and not that I am giving or capable of giving legal advice, but it would seem that any photographs (etc.) that were deemed "fair use" on Wikipedia would be similarly deemed "fair use" in personal communications (perhaps not as part of a business newsletter, though). From Fair use: "Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 17 U.S.C. § 106 and 17 U.S.C. § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." [emphasis added] -- 74.137.108.115 (talk) 23:12, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Private Email to my friend Adam Arkin

I was in contact with Adam Arkin whilst still with his own Adam Arkin site, but have since closed down, and I havent been able to find him since. Please let me know how I can email him again. I am in Australia, and would dearly love to chat to him again. Thanks. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.161.149.166 (talk) 15:06, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

You might try finding his old site at http://www.archive.org/index.php - type his OLD url into the search box and it if you've lead a clean and honest life, up will pop his old web site - and hopefully his email address will still be there. Good luck! SteveBaker (talk) 15:12, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Note, if the address you used to contact him was an account associated with the site then the address might be gone as well. Dismas|^(talk) 19:30, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

The usual advice about contacting someone in showbiz or publishing is to write c/o his agent. —Tamfang (talk) 22:08, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

orlando, florida

how long does it take to travel by car from Orlando to Plant City, Florida? (or vice versa) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.109.133.92 (talk) 15:58, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

According to Google Maps [1], it's 66.5 miles and will take about one hour and 14 minutes. --Thomprod (talk) 16:12, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

US War Deficit of $1trillion.

I have read that ex-President Bush's legacy will be remembered as a $1trillion deficit in the US economy caused by his involvement in Iraq and Afghanisatn. Be that as it may, and without aspiring to begin a chain of justification or denouncement responses, is it pragmatically reasonable of me to assume that such expenditure, however effectual or otherwise it may ultimately be judged to have been in pursuit of Bush's political ambitions, has at the very least created a source of jobs, materiels acquisition, production, distribution, research and development, wealth creation, and other fiscal and economic stimulus benefits - not just for and in the USA, but also for and in those other countries that have manufactured, supplied and consumed said materiel, in and by the opposing factions, such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, not to mention, Iran and Russia (and any other nation that I am not aware of as having been involved)? 92.23.31.56 (talk) 20:24, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

This is really a matter of speculation - and we don't like to speculate here on the RD. It's not really reasonable to assume that the only way Bush could think of to create jobs (advance technology, etc) was to spend a terabuck on fighting two wars. The consequence of fighting two wars might be those benefits - but that's never going to be the reason. For once we'll have a way to prove that because the nation is about to spend another terabuck on doing economic stimulus the OTHER way. SteveBaker (talk) 20:33, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

War certainly creates jobs and helps the economy, but it usually does so at the expense of other things. The money that was spent on the war could have been spent on other things or saved (either by the government, or by the public through lower taxes). War encourages spending, rather than saving, which is usually a good thing in the short term and a bad thing in the long term. It's all a matter of balancing pros and cons, as with anything else. --Tango (talk) 20:37, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

In general, spending money on any activity will have the type of benefits you listed, war included. However, that doesn't mean that all such spending is equally beneficial. Spending a trillion on free college for any American who can meet admission requirements, for example, would be far more beneficial to the US than the war in Iraq, due to the primary benefit of providing a more skilled workforce, and would also have similar secondary benefits of reducing unemployment and crime, increasing R&D, etc. This is phrased by economists as the opportunity cost, what was given up to fund the war, in this case. StuRat (talk) 21:14, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Increasing the skill level of your workforce is only beneficial if you have skilled jobs for them at the end of it - there's no point giving someone a college education if the only job they can get afterwards is sweeping roads, and somebody has to sweep the roads, so that puts an upper bound of the proportion of the workforce it is worth educating to that level. --Tango (talk) 01:36, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Except that more educated workforce also increases the likelyhood of someone creating a robotic road sweeper! There are not simply a fixed number of jobs availible at each education level; increasing education also increased the demand for higher education because the number of entrepreneurs would increase as well... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 01:59, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

It's relatively rare to have an over-educated workforce. I believe that this may be the case is some parts of India, but not in the US, which currently needs to import highly skilled workers such as doctors, scientists, and engineers. StuRat (talk) 05:19, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

You'd be better off just giving the money away. The problem with spending it on war is that it employs the fit as soldiers and the intelligent as weapons makers. Neither are very productive and if the money was given to the weak and stupid instead they would still spend the money and the strong and intelligent might actually do something useful instead of wasting their lives. Dmcq (talk) 18:38, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

But many inventions developed for warfare can later be used by civilians, such as jet airplanes from WW2 and a petroleum-free fuel source worked on more recently for and by the US military. StuRat (talk) 21:49, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Relaxing things that would lend themselves to being an online game.

My sister is putting together a web site for her business [2] - which is one of those "Life coaching" things. She's trying to attract more visitors to her site and we're thinking that we'd get more incoming links and boost her Google page rank if she had some fun things there that people would link to and spread around. What she wants is some games (perhaps 'activities') of a relaxational or de-stressing kind. A classic example - she saw a site that has 'virtual bubble-wrap' for you to pop [3] - and she would like other things like that. As the family's resident game programmer - I get to implement whatever it turns out to be.

I'm thinking of things like stroking a virtual cat - or maybe games like SameGame or something that people might find non-stressful. Personally, there are times when a "machine gunning down my coworkers" game would be de-stressing but apparently that's more distressing than destressing!

What games or activities do people find relaxing and/or de-stressing? SteveBaker (talk) 20:25, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Word games? I saw one site that had famous quotations where the words were scrambled. The author of the quote wasn't displayed, so that added a level of difficulty but they weren't timed or anything like that which would add anxiety and stress. Many people also find Sudoku to be relaxing. Dismas|^(talk) 20:36, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

PS You might want to reduce the size of those images. Even on DSL the page took at least 30 seconds to load. Dismas|^(talk) 20:39, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes - I know. Job number one (which I just started this afternoon) is to fix up the site so it works smoothely...it's crap for several other reasons too: Everyone looks at it and sees three menu options - not noticing the little scroll arrows either side of the menu that reveal half a dozen other menu options. I looked at the web page stats - the main page got over 1000 hits so far - the two other pages you can get to immediately got ~800 hits - and the pages that you have to click the arrows to get to got 5 hits each! My sister didn't get the 'geek' genes that I inherited and she used some kind of freebie automatic web site generator...well, you get what you pay for.)...anyway - I don't want to derail this question into one about web site design. Think relaxing, calming thoughts...deep breath...let it out S-L-O-W-L-Y. Try not to think about how horrible CSS and JavaScript are. :-) SteveBaker (talk) 21:46, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Here's some:

• A while ago I wrote a little python/pygame program (but it should be just as easy in javascript) which a) generated a random colour, b) generated its compliment (just 180 degree rotation of hue in HSV space) c) generated several "buddy colours" for each, by jittering each h,s,v value by a random amount up to about 10% d) draw squares in each colour e) wait a few seconds then goto a. This, it turns out, is all rather mesmeric - you just sit and watch the pretty colour combinations (which the algorithm guarantees all work quite nicely together). With a nice black or charcoal background that should be rather zen. Warning - you can do this without reading the color difference article, which will only make you sad.
• A while ago I designed a website. The customer insisted on a splash screen (no, I couldn't talk them out of it). For it I had four square images, each that cycled through a few pretty photos (viva istockphoto) with nice javascript+css fading. The clever bit was that I set the animation speed (just the delay on the fader timeout) differently (they're not quite relatively coprime, but the net time-until-identical is still very long) - so the images are shown in different combinations an (apparently) random fashion. Again, it's quite calming to watch. Get some nice calming stock photos, and add in to one cycle her company's logo.
• (this all the way back to my beloved C=64) Draw a range of images that have small circles on them (tiny, small, medium, big, huge), then write javascript that cycles a given div through them in a pulsing order (tsmbhbmst...) on a timer. Then arrange several hundred on the page (I'm really thinking of even "huge" being 20px in diameter, so not really huge at all), but have their initial condition be like smooth natural-looking contours (like a map of the cotswolds). Then set all of them off cycling together - you'll see rippling patterns moving in and out - all a bit TOTP.1977.

Let us know how it works out. 87.113.74.22 (talk) 22:19, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

I was watching a programme about a Victorian Farm and one of the participants remarked that sawing a log was "remarkably Zen", by which I take it he means a repetitive, boring activity that somehow switches your mind off from thinking. So along those lines, sawing wood, raking leaves, raking pebbles (well that must be Zen!), kneading dough... --TammyMoet (talk) 10:08, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

How about some sort of 'colouring-in' activity. Set up some pretty repeating geometric patterns (like you certainly used to be able to get books of) made just from black lines on a white background. Have virtual 'paintpots' in a few colours and effectively give them a fill tool only. So you can quickly and easily fill each little shape with the colour of your choice and create any design you want. The books used to keep me quiet for a while when I was little; I bet they'd have worked for longer if I didn't have to try to be neat :) 79.66.105.133 (talk) 11:57, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Herding sheep maybe. Draw a fence and have sheep hop over it at random intervals. The user can click to the left of, the right of or behind the sheep to move a sheepdog into position the dog will then issue a "woof" the sheep will either hop across the fence or evade the dog. Put in a limit that no more than 2 sheep at a time get out, otherwise it won't be relaxing. After a couple of successful herdings you can let the herd snooze for a couple of seconds. (With happy zzz in clouds floating off. 76.97.245.5 (talk) 15:05, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

I find 3D Logic to be rather relaxing. In general, I'd say anything without a timer/timed actions can be relaxing. I should probably add that any frustration should be kept to a minimum as well. -- 74.137.108.115 (talk) 22:53, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - that's an interesting game - it's a bit easy and way too short though. Just 30 levels and most of them you can do in 30 seconds. I got stuck on a couple...but once you get into the swing of it, most levels were easy. SteveBaker (talk) 06:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm - I like the idea of the Zen garden - but it might be a bit lacking in activity...which is perhaps the reason it's relaxing. Maybe I should think in terms of gardening in general. SteveBaker (talk) 06:15, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

One of my favourite pass-the-time websites is this falling sand game. I (and my six-year-old) find it quite distracting, but there's a quite a lot of room for improvement if someone wanted to invest the time in it. Being able to mix things, make compounds, have stuff burn at different temperatures/colours, etc. are all possibilities. The neat thing about something like this (where people just play with stuff by making them interact) is that you can make it as complicated as you wish and add more when you feel the need. Matt Deres (talk) 01:17, 27 January 2009 (UTC)