Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2013 December 20

= December 20 =

Babylonian Method Of Calculating Roots
What is the history behind the Babylonian Method? Such as:


 * Do we have an article on this topic?
 * Was it published in a treatise?
 * Was it compiled in a anthology of mathematical formulae?174.3.125.23 (talk) 01:11, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * See "Babylonian method".—Wavelength (talk) 01:37, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * How is calculating square roots any different from calculating cube roots?174.3.125.23 (talk) 01:46, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Maybe you should ask this on the Math desk... AnonMoos (talk) 12:45, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Because the first calculates square roots and the second calculates cube roots? I don't understand your confusion.  If you read our article on the Babylonian method, it's clear that the method doesn't work for cube roots.  --Bowlhover (talk) 21:35, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * My question is: What makes calculating a $$n$$ root different from others? Such as: What makes the-method-which-works-for-square-roots render the computation of a cubic root impossible?174.3.125.23 (talk) 02:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Um, as Bowlhover already said, because it calculates square roots, not cube roots? Seriously, this question will receive better answers on the maths desk --109.189.65.217 (talk) 21:11, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Which was the first recognized country ?
I admit that it is a bit of a trick question. Today, a new country would only be considered as such if it is recognized by other countries. Obviously, the first country to be could then never have been, since there would have had to be countries before that country, an argument a bit in absurdum. So there were obviously other criteria at some point in time. Could anyone shed light on this? On earlier ways considering what the first country might have been and on when the change came to be this "recognized" criteria, which seems to limit any countries existence to first have to conform to the existing countries norms? DanielDemaret (talk) 09:28, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The question isn't answerable in those terms, unless you can give us a very precise definition of "recognize" in this context, and then we might stand a small chance of examining exactly what "recognized" exactly what. You might like to read Diplomatic history and Political history of the world for some pointers.--Shantavira|feed me 12:19, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

DanielDemaret -- One position is that the modern diplomatic system as we know it today more or less came into being with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. According to that point of view, all the main European states existing in 1648 recognized each other at that time (see Westphalian sovereignty etc.)... AnonMoos (talk) 12:41, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Although there was a well developed ambassadorial system before that; see The Ambassadors (Holbein) from 1533. Alansplodge (talk) 13:04, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The existence of ambassadors doesn't necessarily have anything to with the recognisation of countries. --Saddhiyama (talk) 00:44, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * One possibly relevant distinction is between the city-state and nation-state. City-states developed in prehistoric antiquity, where one city was the center of the nation or Empire.  An example is the Roman Empire.  Only a few of these exist today, though, such as Singapore, Monaco, etc.  So, perhaps what you are asking is which was the first nation-state ? StuRat (talk) 14:00, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Various ancient civilisations such as the Ancient Egyptians, Hittites, Sumerians, ancient Assyrians and so on were on various occasions willing to recognise the existence of other nations by (for example) making peace treaties with them. One such treaty (or, perhaps, a declaration of war) would be the first recorded instance of one nation recognising another. The verbiage would often mention an individual ruler on each side, but it's still a recognition of another nation as existing. So you're looking at somewhere between 3500 B.C. and 1500 B.C. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 14:18, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Earliest known peace treaty, in or around 1259 B.C., between Egypt and the Hittites. Includes such modern niceties as extradition arrangements for political opponents. It's pretty certain that nations "recognised" each other in such ways before this; but not that we have records of. --Demiurge1000 (talk) 17:45, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Upper and Lower Egypt were unified into a state by Narmer ca. 3500 BC and there are mentions of neighboring states. That's about as far back as you can go in the documented archaeological record although other countries have their own traditions that may or may not be historically accurate. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 19:46, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * But if the question is about the current network of countries recognizing each other, one of the earliest recorded is Uruk, which diplomatically recognised several other states early on. Til Eulenspiegel /talk/ 21:48, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * If we're strictly talking humans here (you never know with trick questions). Maiasaurs may have had some permanent territory (their nesting colonies) in Montana, where about 10,000 of them died together. Perhaps Egg Mountain could be seen as the seat of a nomadic empire. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:48, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

Dear me, I am very grateful for all insightful responses here. I got more than I bargained for in the details. However, the core of my question is in what makes a country a country, and according to whom and when. This list may be a good starting point to what I am really after : List_of_unrecognized_countries. Some might argue that the title in itself is misleading, since either it is recognized or it is no country at all. One might comapare the list with List_of_states_with_limited_recognition. If one asks people whether they are countries or not, one will get different answers from different groups of people : The fence between these two groups of people would be the the principle of recognition. So let me add a question: Is the principle of recognition the only valid way of deciding whether an entity is a country or not? And now to the original question: When did that principle BECOME the only way of deciding this. Did it become the deciding principle become established and accepted since Uruk (thank you @Til Eulenspiegel ) ? If so, then incidentally the naming of the article with the list of "unrecognized countries" is a contradiction in terms. DanielDemaret (talk) 10:35, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I just noticed that both links lead to the same article. Silly me. So le me put it differently. Some of the countries listed have no recognition at all, so should they really be listed as a "country" in there? DanielDemaret (talk) 10:38, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * As far as I can tell so far, there are a number of possibilities.  @AnonMoos has implied the treaty of Westfalia and Til has implied that the principle has been there since the dawn of history. I have tried to read up from your suggestion, but have not yet come to a conclusion for myself. DanielDemaret (talk) 10:46, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Still reading. Diplomatic_recognition is interesting. Perhaps I shall have to make do with phrases like "some consider" :) DanielDemaret (talk) 10:54, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I think I found an answer in the article about a Sovereign state under the sections about a constitutive and declarative theories. "This theory of recognition was developed in the 19th century". It leads to a further question, i e which of the theories are considered valid, but that is for another time. Thank you all. I shall see if I can find the way to check this off as "resolved". DanielDemaret (talk) 11:01, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Strictly speaking, I think I have two answers. Uruk as being the first to recognize, and 19th century as being when it officially became a way to decide what a country is. Thanks all! DanielDemaret (talk) 11:03, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * And probably the Westphalian treaty was the upstart of what became developed into the theory. DanielDemaret (talk) 11:09, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Which US presidents opposed or supported the death penalty?
Which US presidents of the 20th century supported or opposed the death penalty? I am especially interested how Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson thought about it. Did those two chief executives oppose it as they are considered as liberals? --92.228.5.244 (talk) 10:53, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * This may be not precisely addressing the question. The original Pennsylvania Law Code (1682) restricted possible appliance of the death penalty to cases involving premeditated murder and treason. --Askedonty (talk) 12:11, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * 92.228.5.244 -- Presidents are only directly involved in Capital punishment by the United States federal government, and there have been rather few federal executions after the 1950s (five, if I'm counting correctly). However, I don't think that any modern president has come out against the death penalty in all cases while in office... AnonMoos (talk) 12:34, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * 26 executions since 1950 says that article. You have to count civilian and military which are listed in a separated article. Rmhermen (talk) 20:39, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * I was counting from 1960, not 1950 (since the question was about Kennedy and Johnson)... AnonMoos (talk) 09:09, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Overt refusal to enforce a legally-imposed death penalty, by a president or a governor, could well be grounds for impeachment. The executive takes an oath to uphold the law, and doesn't include anything about deciding which laws to uphold. Executives who have the power of clemency can commute a condemned prisoner's sentence. But apparently not all governors have that power. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:23, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The individual subject to elections who really got in trouble over the death penalty was Rose Bird of the California Supreme court. She voted on the court to overturn every single death-penalty case that came before her, but she didn't declare the death penalty unconstitutional, but instead found various narrow technicalities in each case to object to.  She had no meaningful answer to the question of whether she would ever uphold the death penalty in any circumstances whatsoever.  Many California Democrats have unfond memories of Rose Bird as a semi-disingenuous person whose idiosyncracies and flaws helped catalyze the rise of the right wing in California politics... AnonMoos (talk) 09:20, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Of course I'm generally in favor of that which irritates California Democrats. But I think, even without that, I'd like Rose Bird anyway.  It's true that her presentation of her position was not entirely honest.  But it was how she kept the state from murdering people. --Trovatore (talk) 10:11, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Capital punishment is not murder. Murder is the unlawful taking of human life. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:18, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Murder is murder. Man's law is null and void when it conflicts with natural law. --Trovatore (talk) 10:20, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Yes, murder is murder. Capital punishment, warfare and induced abortion do not qualify as murder. The USA is under the jurisdiction of the US Constitution. "Natural law" is irrelevant. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:27, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Natural law is not irrelevant, and it supersedes the constitution. The constitution was largely written to express natural law.  It didn't always do it perfectly.  But in any case, natural law is utterly unsusceptible to modification by any political process whatsoever. --Trovatore (talk) 10:29, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The US Constitution is the supreme law of the land. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:36, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The supreme human law of the land. Human law is inferior to God's law. --Trovatore (talk) 10:37, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * God's law is a good ideal to adhere to for personal morality. However, it has no legal standing in America. America is not a theocracy. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:45, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * America is not a theocracy, meaning it's not under the jurisdiction of those who claim to speak for God, no. That's a different thing from not being under the jurisdiction of God.  You're talking about murder relative to some legal code.  I'm talking about it in an absolute sense. --Trovatore (talk) 10:50, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Give me your definition of murder, then. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:53, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I know the exact circumstances that constitute murder. But I do insist that it's a concept that transcends law books.  Humans have always had it, whether they had a legal code in our sense of the word or not.  That's the sense I was using the word, not in the sense of anything written in a book.
 * Let me put it another way, so it's not just about the definition of a word. Rose Bird's "personal morality", as you put it, instructed her to behave as she did.  Was she right to let her personal morality take precedence over the wishes of a majority of tens of millions of Californians?  Depends.  If she was right and they were wrong, then yes she was. --Trovatore (talk) 10:58, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * If she could defend her decision within the confines of the laws of California and the USA, then she could be considered to be right. If she defended her decision on something other than the laws of California and the USA, then she was wrong. Obviously, society has always had rules or laws against extreme behavior, such as murder, because it's damaging to the social fabric. Is warfare murder? Is induced abortion murder? What about the use of deadly force to protect yourself? Is that murder? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:04, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * No, she was right if and only if she was right, period. Right and wrong are not about human law.  The other questions are a distraction and I'm not going to address them at this time. --Trovatore (talk) 11:10, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Cop-out. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 11:17, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * So far as I am aware, Michael Dukakis was the only (major party) candidate ever to express opposition to the death penalty, and doing so caused a huge hubbubb, and hurt him in the election. μηδείς (talk) 16:53, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Probably not as much as looking silly while driving a tank did. -- Jayron  32  17:56, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * That was kind of the flip side of Nixon walking on the beach in a business suit. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:17, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Dukakis' experience (and expectations of similar treatment before him) possibly influenced many Presidents to either avoid commenting, or to say what they thought the electorate wanted to hear, rather than what they really thought. Knowing what politicians actually think is one of those great mysteries of life. HiLo48 (talk) 23:58, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * The "many" you mention would be three, and Clinton and Bush executed people, while Obama, as a former senator, only had opportunity to have them assassinated by drone strike. μηδείς (talk) 01:38, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Note that Obama has shown great restraint in the use of drones. For example, not once (that we know of) has he ordered a drone strike on Congress. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:16, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * On the specific question about JFK and LBJ, I don't know where to point you on JFK. But Victor Feguer was executed on LBJ's watch, and Johnson evidently passed on the opportunity to stop that from happening.  That doesn't by itself answer the question of whether he thought it was good policy, and I don't know the answer to that.  (But if I had to guess, my guess would be that the fairly socially conservative Johnson was likely a death-penalty supporter &mdash; emphasis on "guess".) --Trovatore (talk) 01:50, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Honestly, it's a subject that really doesn't come up. Regardless of one's personal beliefs, if the justice system in a state or at the federal level has determined a death sentence, politically speaking the executive would have to have a pretty powerful reason to commute the sentence other than just, "I don't believe in the death penalty." ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:16, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Well, it depends on the kind of "believe" you're talking about. If you just don't think it's good policy, that's one thing.  If you think it's an active moral evil and an offense against God, that's another matter.
 * I think both Pat Brown and Jerry Brown believed that exact thing, at one time, and the elder Brown commuted many (but not all) of the sentences where he had a chance to. How he made the distinction between the ones where he did and the ones where he didn't is a bit murky, but that's the human condition.  The younger Brown never had to face the issue directly in his first two terms, but he did appoint Rose Bird (which contributed noticeably to it not coming directly to his desk).
 * What Brown thinks now, and what he would do this time around, I don't really know. --Trovatore (talk) 02:27, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Legal restrictions prevented Pat Brown from stopping the execution of Caryl Chessman, though he did make the effort. Jerry Brown has any number of folks on death row, one obvious one being Scott Peterson. The evidence against Peterson was largely by inference, but I'm not aware that Jerry has done anything about commuting his sentence. (Not that I would question the verdict, but only that some might take the approach of "beyond ALL doubt".) ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:47, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * I would be really surprised if the Peterson case came up before Brown, even if he gets a fourth term. There are over 700 people on California death row, and no one has been executed in almost eight years.  But it's not unlikely that he'll have to face the issue for someone.  (I don't know of anything that stops him from commuting Peterson's sentence pro-actively without waiting for an execution date to be set, but he hasn't evinced any interest in that sort of thing in the past.) --Trovatore (talk) 02:58, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It has probably occurred to the Gov that California has a lot bigger problems than worrying about a convicted killer about whom no serious questions of innocence have arisen. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:48, 21 December 2013 (UTC)


 * See also Toney Anaya for a governor who commuted all death sentences on the basis of categorical opposition to the death penalty. The case of George Ryan is more nuanced; he could countenance the death penalty in a regime where he believed it would be applied without error, but did not think that could be guaranteed at the time in Illinois. --Trovatore (talk) 02:43, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * It might also have been an attempt at distracting from the truck drivers' licenses scandal, although I wouldn't necessary question his argument. I wonder what he would have done with the likes of John Gacey. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:47, 21 December 2013 (UTC)

Mannfred of Sicily
Do we know the history behind this image of Manfred of Sicily? --The Emperor&#39;s New Spy (talk) 17:29, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Just speculating, but could the bird he's holding be symbolic of the arms of Hohenstaufen? See File:King Manfred of Sicily Arms.svg which shows the eagle/falcon as the arms of Hohenstaufen kings of Sicily (Manfred specifically here) and File:Frederick II and eagle.jpg which shows Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor with a similar eagle.  Apparently, Hohenstaufen association with eagles and falcons derives from Frederick II's authorship of De arte venandi cum avibus, which was dedicated to Manfred.  So both Frederick and apparently Manfred were associated strongly with falconry and that would explain the motif in artworks and symbols of the Hohenstaufens.  -- Jayron  32  18:20, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Here's the original page from De arte venandi cum avibus, from the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana online. ---Sluzzelin talk  18:27, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. The image file is so not informative.--The Emperor&#39;s New Spy (talk) 03:33, 21 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Those are jesses in the photo, aren't they? Wnt (talk) 21:41, 22 December 2013 (UTC)