Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 September 28

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September 28

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when Wikipediasends an email link to confirm new email address for notifications, it has a TIMEOUT label which is only about 30 seconds after despatch. This is sometimes TOO SHORT. PLEASE REVIEW option to allow 5 minutes turnaround before link expires. thanks from ptrdxn. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Ptrdxn (talk • contribs) 07:42, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Assuming that's even true, if it's too short then how did you manage to create an account? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 10:15, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Ptrdxn is referring to the confirmation-of-email-address email. To create a wikimedia (inc. wikipedia) account, you do not need to give an email address. I suspect the best place to ask about this is over at the Village Pump, technical section ---- 10:48, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

I'd be amazed if it really was that short - but for sure it's not enough. For my wife's business website, we find that in some cases, email delivery can take up to three hours. One notable way this happens is with Google's gmail - if you enable the option to have it phone/text you when an email arrives. Evidently, their system can only send out those phone/texts at some limited rate (maybe there are specialized phone lines involved or something?) and they don't deliver the email into your in-box until they've kicked off your notification! Bizarre - but a timeout time of even an hour would be too short in some cases. SteveBaker (talk) 13:16, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Gibbous moon

If you do an image search for moon and remove the fictional or non-Luna ones, you'd be struck by the fact that our moon essentially has two phases - full or fingernail. If you narrowed down the search to only moon painting, you see the effect even more clearly. What is it about the gibbous moon that makes people not want to photograph it or draw it? Obviously such images exist, but the ratio is completely out of whack. Is is just harder to draw? Matt Deres (talk) 13:38, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Google Images has quite a few of them. If there are fewer than full and crescent, maybe it's just not as interesting to the average citizen. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:13, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Could this have anything to do with a trademark dispute between the Bee Gees and the American makers of Moon Pie when the former came to the states? μηδείς (talk) 21:21, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

You lost me at the bakery. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:06, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Gibbous. Of, or pertaining to a Gibb. Moon Pies (and even the mighty Jos Louis) ostensibly had to make do with a generic bearingless wheel sort of shape. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:28, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Alrighty then. I just wasn't aware there were any Gibbous Moon Pies. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:47, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Exactly. Just the way they wanted it. Word is you can still buy them in some states, but you have to show up after the store closes. Don't Forget to Remember. It's a fine line between what the average citizen is aware of and what he's interested in. Did you know you can ask a bakery for things they don't offer? This includes knockoff Moon Pies, of any phase. If you're ever in Canada, there are 1/2 Jos Louis. Fewer than half the calories, but over half the sodium and nine grams more sugar. Go figure. InedibleHulk (talk) 07:08, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

If I had to guess (which I do, because I don't know for sure!), I'd speculate that it may be that painting a gibbous moon makes it look like you were trying to paint a full moon and just didn't get the shape quite right...so people prefer to go with either the totally full shape, or just a sliver. SteveBaker (talk) 13:12, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

That makes sense. The full moon and the crescent moon can be anthropomorphized a bit. There's really nowhere to go with a gibbous moon, which vaguely looks like a lemon. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:47, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, Steve Baker's explanation is exactly what I was thinking. If all you're painting is the moon you can work to show the shadowed portion enough to indicate it's actually a sphere. But if its just part of the background, crescent or full will be better. μηδείς (talk) 17:10, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Why does the US use thousands of pounds when talking about trucks?

The article United States customary units says (of mass) "In the United States, only the ounce, pound and short ton—known in the country simply as the ton—are commonly used...". In Australia (where I grew up) and in Britain (where I live now), if we were talking about a truck, we would say it weighs 20 tons, or it could carry 20 tons, but when I watch American TV programs, they always refer to trucks in terms of "thousands of pounds", so in my example it would be 40,000 pounds. Why is this, given that the ton is used in the US? Thanks! --TrogWoolley (talk) 17:08, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Maybe it sounds more impressive? --Jayron32 17:14, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

The way units are used is really just a matter of custom. From the UK (where lots of us still use imperial units for many things) it seems odd that Americans measure distances on the road in feet rather than yards, milk in quarts rather than pints (though their pints and quarts are smaller than ours) and people's weight in pounds rather than stones. --ColinFine (talk) 18:17, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

"Milk in quarts rather than pints"? Doesn't that just depend on how much milk you want? I normally think of milk as being measured in gallons. The smallest quantity I normally buy to keep in the fridge (as opposed to a single-serving container) is a half gallon, and it's always sold as a "half gallon", not "two quarts" or much less "four pints".

But in my elementary-school days, they would sell us single-serving containers of a "half pint". I always thought it was strange that they didn't call it a "cup". But I think our British friends don't use "cups" at all. --Trovatore (talk) 14:30, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Cups are what we drink tea out of. Milk comes in pints (or litres, but litre bottles are always disappointingly small), I buy four-pint bottles. At primary school we used to get little third-of-a-pint bottles - but remember, British pints are bigger than American ones. Cows produce milk in gallons, but it's sold in pints. Almost nothing comes in quarts. DuncanHill (talk) 14:43, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Custom also includes whether units are mixed or not (whether you give a person's height as 5.75 feet, 69 inches, or 5 feet 9 inches). Using the smaller unit (69 inches) allows for more precision without needing to use fractions or decimals. For vehicle weights, measurements more precise than whole tons are important and the custom happens to be to use pounds rather than mixed tons and pounds. --65.94.51.64 (talk) 18:23, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

Weight limit signs for roads and bridges in the U.S. always show tons (or actually T). Trucks are sometimes identified in ton sizes like the deuce and a half. Also there are ton capacity measurement for trucks: Truck_classification#Ton_rating. Rmhermen (talk) 18:30, 28 September 2014 (UTC)

• I am not so sure what TV shows Woolley's referring to, but there is the issue of the short ton, the long ton, and the metric ton. Pounds remain pounds, while just hearing the word ton can be ambiguous. μηδείς (talk)

Don't forget the short assay ton, the long assay ton (both of which are different for US and UK and are some small number of grams), the register ton (100 cubic feet), the shipping or freight ton (40 cubic feet) and the displacement ton (35 cubic feet), the water ton (224 british gallons), the ton force, the oil ton (10¹⁰ international table calories) and the coal ton (7x10⁹) international table calories), the refrigeration ton (rate of heat extraction required to turn one ton of water into ice), the tnt-ton, the tun (irish, british or US tuns are all different), or the roman ton, the deadweight ton, the dry ton, the harbor ton, the shortweight and longweight tons (not the same as short and long tons), the gross and net tons...<sigh>

The trouble with 'pound' is that it's also a unit of currency - so we Brits tend to avoid using it in situations where it could cause ambiguity between weight and money. Sadly, "pound" isn't immune to the problem with tons...we have the troy pound, the apothecary pound, the avoirdupois pound, various pounds are used in the paper industry to represent density, the roman pound, the romana pound, the arabic silver pound...etc. The pound has also changed in value from it's traditional definition that depended on the local gravitational force to the "international avoirdupois pound" which is defined in terms of the kilogram. SteveBaker (talk) 13:06, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Yes, but given the context it is immediately obvious that if you say that a truck weighs 22,000 lbs with cargo, you are not talking about British notes, paper density, or solid gold. μηδείς (talk) 17:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

If you say it 'weighs 22,000 lbs", then I agree - but if you say "a 22,000 pound truck" then in Britain where a small truck might indeed cost 22,000 UK pounds, that could very easily cause confusion. (Of course, we'd call its "lorry" - but that's an entirely different matter!) SteveBaker (talk) 15:14, 30 September 2014 (UTC)

• • Specific examples: I watched some episodes of Smash Lab over the weekend. In both the episode where they try to stop a runaway truck with nets and try to prevent a timber truck rollover, both referred to the weight of the truck in thousands of pounds. In the latter episode, they spoke of "6,000 pound logs"; IMO "3 ton logs" would be accurate enough, whether short, long or metric. Besides, I doubt the logs would weight exactly 6,000 since there were clearly varying diameters. Another that springs to mind is the Penn and Teller when Teller lies under the wheel of the truck and is run over. Penn said the trucked weighed 55,000 pounds. I doubt that was accurate to the nearest pound. --TrogWoolley (talk) 11:41, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
  • Only an issue in an international context like Wikipedia. --65.94.51.64 (talk) 06:33, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
    • That's a naive assumption. "A 30,000 pound truck" could just mean a really expensive truck in the UK. That would be a genuine source of confusion in a situation like the Smash Lab episode where the announcer is talking about stopping a 30,000 pound truck - is he saying that it's an expensive truck that we don't want to destroy, or a heavy truck that could do some real damage? In the case of the Penn & Teller thing - when someone only specifies the first 2 digits of a long number like that, the general presumption is that it's only being expressed to two significant digits of precision. It's remotely possible that the truck weights exactly 55,000 lbs - but it's very unlikely because if it did weigh that much he'd probably have said "exactly 55,000lbs". Since he didn't, most people are going to assume that he means "between 54,500 and 55,500lbs". But even if he'd said 55,123 lbs, you'd still have to wonder whether it's 55,123 exactly or whether he means "between 55122.5 and 55123.5lbs". It's an unfortunate part of common speech that the error bars in our statements are left open to this kind of interpretation - but for non-scientific uses, it's generally good enough. SteveBaker (talk) 13:06, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
      • You and Trog have accidentally broken the context of my "international context" comment by inserting yours above it. Medeis claimed that "ton" could be ambiguous (short/long/metric); I responded to that by saying that since the question was specifically about US usage this isn't true: in the US a "ton" is always a short ton unless there is a specific reason to imply otherwise. Similarly, when talking about US usage it's irrelevant if "a 30,000-pound truck" could be ambiguous in the UK. --65.94.51.64 (talk) 14:19, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
        • I'll have to ask my Dad, since he's an engineer and used to work in the dockyards, but the difference between long and short ton did come up often enough when I was in elementary school that I was aware of the concept. μηδείς (talk) 17:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
          • I am advised that within the last two decades my source was hired to rectify a construction project where not taking into account the difference in short and long (not metric) tons as used by various steel suppliers had caused a boiler to fail. According to him the long ton originally came from the weight that would displace 40 cubic feet of seawater, and was still in use when he worked at the shipyards. μηδείς (talk) 21:49, 29 September 2014 (UTC)
• I'm not sure this is a general phenomenon, i.e. I question your premise. I hear people discuss weight of trucks in tons all the time, and this Ngram supports the notion that "[X] ton truck" is much more common in print than "[X] pound truck" -[1]. We even use tons in our classification of trucks: Truck_classification#Ton_rating -- though of course we've mucked that up to the point where a modern "1/2 ton" pickup truck can carry much more than 1/2 ton. SemanticMantis (talk) 18:54, 29 September 2014 (UTC) EDIT- didn't see Rmhermen had the link first, but the signage (see [2]) does usually say T or 'tons' in the USA. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:07, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

Hmmm....it's almost as though the "ton" version is a rough description of a type of truck that has only sketchy relation to the actual weight - but people revert to pounds when they are talking about the actual weight. Weird. SteveBaker (talk) 21:03, 29 September 2014 (UTC)

A truck which crashed in Scranton, Pennsylvania was described in newspapers at the time as carrying 15 tons of bananas. Singer Harry Chapin used the more lyrical version of 30,000 Pounds of Bananas.    → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 06:23, 30 September 2014 (UTC)