Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2012 June 22

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.

June 22

Patents and secret recipes/formulas

I hope this isn't considered legal advice, as I just want clarifications on some things. I just saw a product which says "patented formula". Does this mean that the formula cannot be kept secret, or it can? I'm aware that Coke's formula was never patented to keep the formula a secret, but does this mean that if a recipe is patented, the recipe must be made public? Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 09:44, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

My understanding: yes. By patenting a thing, you get protection in exchange for the publication of etals of that which is protected. --Tagishsimon (talk) 09:47, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Patents by definition are always open to viewing (at least they are in the US and other countries with similar systems). (There are a few exceptions. This is not a trans-historical statement — in the US, compulsory disclosure of patent contents was not established until the 19th century, I don't think.) Trade secrets, by contrast, are not. (The latter do have some legal protections, e.g. against industrial espionage, but are not officially licensed monopolies in the same way that a patent is.) As to whether they contain everything necessary to replicate a given device or formula or invention... not always. The key term here is sufficiency of disclosure — and it's a tricky thing. A very clever patent lawyer, paired with an inattentive patent examiner, can lead to patents that grant monopolies but don't give quite enough information to replicate the actual invention. --Mr.98 (talk) 14:27, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Note: Coca-Cola indeed has | lots of patents, some are already expired, and it even patented the original formula in 1893 (but not the subsequent formula). OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:19, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

As an anecdote, I once heard that many German chemical patents filed in the U.S. Patent Office during the late 19th to early 20th centuries often had deliberately misleading information. Thus, when America joined World War I, in 1917—and nationalized Bayer's, BASF's, etc. patents—they were totally useless to our scientists since faithfully following the formulas resulted in useless chemicals, violent explosions, or even highly toxic gas clouds! (Whoever said "war is ugly" certainly wasn't kidding!) Pine (talk) 01:42, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

That sounds highly apocryphal to me. That Europe would have been engulfed in endless war would have been non-obvious before it happened; that the United States would have joined the war was unclear even until the moment it did. If the Germans were that sneaky — and frankly I doubt it, because it's not that clever a scheme for all the work it would have required — the obvious targets would have been France and the U.K., not the USA. The US did suffer from the lack of access to the German chemical industry during WWI, and in its attempts to rapidly organize a parallel industry in the United States there were plenty of opportunities for problems (James B. Conant was involved in a war-profiteering scheme early on as a young chemist, and the result was a plant explosion that killed his partner) but the fault there wasn't from German patent sabotage (in Conant's case, it was from inexperience at industrial chemistry). Sorry to be a spoil-sport, but I don't buy it... --Mr.98 (talk) 02:49, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

My late ex-mother-in-law was a chef. She once told me that the top chefs are very loath to divulge their secrets, so when they produce their cookbooks, what you'll be given are recipes that are perfectly OK but still omit some special ingredients or techniques that make them really stand out. You have to work those out for yourself if you have the imagination, or pay money and eat at their restaurants. -- ♬ Jack of Oz ♬ ^{[your turn]} 20:08, 24 June 2012 (UTC)

Back window automatic screen thingy in Lexus

Hi. I let someone in a big, shiny Lexus pull out of his driveway in front of me yesterday. As he did so, my eye was caught by something sliding up the inside of his back windscreen. It appeared to be some kind of mesh. It looked like he was the only one in the car, so I presume there was some mechanism that was pulling it up. The car was not a convertible. Any ideas what it is? --Dweller (talk) 15:14, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Are you sure it was not a convertible? -LarryMac | Talk 15:18, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

It was definitely not a convertible. If it's any help, I think it was a 600 - ([1]) on that site you pointed to. --Dweller (talk) 15:42, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I was trying to point out that Lexus has at least two retractable hard-tops that you wouldn't know are convertibles at a glance. Of course, all the images I can find show the IS250C (and its big brother the IS350C) with the top down, so they're not very helpful. --LarryMac | Talk 16:10, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

What I saw was something that looked soft, sliding up inside the rear windscreen, not something hard sliding up on the outside. --Dweller (talk) 17:13, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

The additional responses below notwithstanding ... a hard-top convertible would not appear to be a convertible at first glance, but still would have use for a retractable windscreen. It would be unusual to raise that screen when the roof is up, but not unheard of, because it can, indeed, act as a shade. --LarryMac | Talk 18:15, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to assume that Dweller is competent enough to recognize a convertible, hardtop or not. The roof seams on hardtop cabrios are pretty obvious. Plus the picture he linked to has four doors, not two. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 18:58, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

It was likely the power rear sunscreen. Orange Suede Sofa (talk) 17:24, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

My car (not a Lexus) also has one of these, although the manufacturer in question refers to it as an "electrically operated rear window blind". Electrically operated by a button in the centre of the dashboard. It's useful for when vehicles with overly bright headlights insist on following you at a close distance, when impatient drivers flash their headlights at you for no practical purpose, and (probably in this case) if one sets off driving then realises that bright sunlight will be mainly behind the car during the journey. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 17:31, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, that sounds right. It was a very sunny day. --Dweller (talk) 22:20, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

Biracial people

Why are most biracial people half-white? --108.227.31.151 (talk) 23:39, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Are they? Where? HiLo48 (talk) 23:57, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Perhaps its because that they are the people that YOU notice and you are oblivious to those that that aren’t. Called the fallacy of confirmation bias if I remember right.--Aspro (talk) 00:05, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

• If you take the existing races to be caucasoid, negroid, and mongoloid (the most common classification), then the answer is not hard to figure out. Looie496 (talk) 00:25, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

I suspect that everyone who is exactly half-white is also half something else. :-) StuRat (talk) 01:07, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure you're correct that they are, but it wouldn't surprise me. Europeans have a longer and wider history of spreading themselves all over the world (in comparison to, say, sub-Saharan "black" Africans, or to the Tibetans). Over the last five centuries or so, Europeans have dipped their, uh, influences in pretty much every every nook and cranny of the globe. For example, Europeans went to Tierra del Fuego, Japan, and Senegal. Not many Senegalese made their way to Japan, nor did many folks from TdF make their way to the African coast, and so on. All this is, of course, complicated by the fact that a term like "race" is an extremely tricky word to pin down into anything meaningful. Matt Deres (talk) 01:45, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

That's a good answer to a bad question. μηδείς (talk) 02:49, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

WAG: Most of the interracial slavery was of blacks by whites, the native American slaves mostly dying off, giving more opportunity for forced procreation. Clarityfiend (talk) 23:27, 23 June 2012 (UTC)

If you mean precisely 50% "white", I doubt that in America they are, other than President Obama. Most "African-Americans" have a lot of European ancestors, so that when the average "black" American and "white" American have a child, that biracial child is a lot more than 50% European/white. If you mean more loosely, that biracial couples tend to involve one "white" person, that's probably because the largest group in America along such arbitrary divisions is still "white". Gzuckier (talk) 03:58, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

By massively far, "most people" does not mean "most people in the US". --NellieBlyMobile (talk) 19:50, 27 June 2012 (UTC)