Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2014 December 22

= December 22 =

Can someone explain this apparent evidence of time-travel? As you'd see in this link, an ipod shows up in the 1650s.
The occurrence "ipod" shows up in the 1650s and doesn't again until the 2000s, of course.

I would like to think that a time-traveler visited the 1650s with his MP3 player and somehow forgot it there when he left.

Wikipedia existed in the past too?
By the way, as if it's the same clumsy time-traveler again? How would our beloved project show up in the early half of the 20th century?

But what is your explanation? --72.178.198.121 (talk) 03:54, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * They're just graphs. Can you find a specific reference? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:03, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, does Google Books draw upon the same resources as that ngram tool? I'll look and see what it digs up. If not, where else ought I to look? --72.178.198.121 (talk) 04:11, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Google Books scanning error -- Paulscrawl (talk) 04:09, 22 December 2014 (UTC)

"Culturomics" via the Google Ngram Viewer Science PDF with gory details We are talking of many, many very, very large numbers - and very imperfect book metadata and OCR technology. NOT to find a coincidence would be news.

You can have as much fun with this as some hyper Orthodox Jews do with numerological coincidences in the Tanakh. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 04:26, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Randall Munroe of xkcd geek comic fame has a great sense for extracting inspired nonsense from ngrams.
 * Stumped for a gift? Buy a couple copies of his truly fantastic great new book (warning: almost all words), What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions. Keep one for yourself, you won't get a chance to borrow it once given. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 04:50, 22 December 2014 (UTC)"
 * Or you could get one of these for a Wikipedian. I don't wear T-shirts myself, but that one did make me smile. Deor (talk) 18:34, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm gueſsing the ſecond graph on his page is due to OCR recognizing the long s as an "f" instead of an "s". Which kind of ſucks (heh) for ſerious purpoſes, but makes for amuſing ngrams. Double ſharp (talk) 07:52, 27 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Agree with what's stated above: "Wikipedia" is presumably an OCR error or a weird typo in the original. As far as "ipod", have you ever looked at a written work from the mid-17th century?  You'll note that some of them don't use the spelling we do now (compare a verse from the original and the "traditional" [from 1769] versions of the King James Bible), so it's also possible that "ipod" is a differently spelled word.  Nyttend (talk) 15:33, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Never mind on ipod. When I searched for the term in books published between 1650 and 1665, I found this page from a book about Alexander the Great by Quintus Curtius Rufus: this is a reprint of an ancient Roman text, and "ipod" is an OCR error for the Latin pronoun quod.  I didn't realise that the Ngram examined non-English books.  Nyttend (talk) 15:40, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * When I run a search for "Wikipedia" and restrict it to books published 1900-1935, the results all seem to be publications with descriptions copied (with attribution) from Wikipedia. See Sultana's Dream, for example; click "More" at the bottom of the description to get the attribution.  I wonder if they gather all text for the Ngram, figuring that page descriptions are so minimal and so insignificant statistically that they might as well include them — it's probably a lot simpler than having the Ngram attempt to exclude them.  Nyttend (talk) 23:10, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Yep, I spend a lot of time reading 17th century stuff, searching Google Books for references for a range of articles here. I'm constantly frustrated by the "false positives" for words that aren't really there but have been incorrectly read by OCR scanners. That said, the fact that we have any of them makes the broader task of referencing 1600s articles much, much easier. I'd far sooner chalk something up to a (relatively common) OCR error than proof of time travel.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 06:12, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * This kind of thing reminds me of the alleged "cell phone" in a 1920s Chaplin movie. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 06:24, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * There's a whole bunch of "proof of time travel" photos online. They are quite amusing.  St ★ lwart 1 1 1 06:29, 23 December 2014 (UTC)


 * I just noticed something interesting in that xkcd page that Nyttend linked to above... about half way down the page, there is an ngram search result for the word "hope"... now compare that to the one just above it (which also searches "hope", along with some other words)... the two graphs don't match.  Same word being searched... different results. Makes me wonder how accurate ngrams really is. Blueboar (talk) 15:57, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

Danish Act of Succession
Do we have any sources as to how Knud, Hereditary Prince of Denmark and his sons felt about being displaced by Frederick IX's daughters in the Danish Act of Succession?--The Emperor&#39;s New Spy (talk) 04:41, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * This Danish text describes him as "bitter" about the change. Marco polo (talk) 19:57, 23 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I found this (in a biographical encyclopedia):
 * Tronfølgeloven af 1953 medførte at K. fik titel af arveprins, men indførelse af den kvindelige arvefølge berøvede i realiteten ham og hans afkom arveretten. K. søgte da også med bistand af højesteretssagfører Leif Gamborg til det sidste at hindre ændringen.
 * Rough translation:
 * The Act of succession of 1953 gave K. the title of hereditary prince, but in reality, the intruduction of female succesion robbed him and his offspring of the right to inherit the throne. With the assistance of Supreme Court attourney Leif Gamborg, K. tried to the last to prevent the change.
 * --NorwegianBluetalk 20:15, 23 December 2014 (UTC)

5th Amendment and Miranda Rights
If the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution states that you cannot self incriminate, then why in the Miranda rights are arrested told that 'anything you do say can and will be used against you in a court of law'? 49.225.24.158 (talk) 05:05, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Read the text of the Fifth Amendment in the links I have created in the title. You have left out an important verb starting with c.  If it is still unclear we can explain further. μηδείς (talk) 05:14, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * This is not a game for your amusement. Either state the answer clearly or don't say anything at all. --Viennese Waltz 09:33, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * The only "c" verb in the amendment is "compelled", which is key. Also, it would be a good idea for the OP to read the wording of the amendment in order to (1) understand what it actually says, and (2) see how much ground it covers, which is considerable. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:55, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Buzz off VW, this is the reference desk, not the answer desk, and we don't do people's homework for them. It's a disservice to the OP to spoonfeed him an answer in our own words when he should be reading the very brief and directly linked source for himself.  If he still has a problem, then we can get him past the stuck point. Read the guidelines, and quit playing the vulture. μηδείς (talk) 18:29, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * I think you'll find that riddles have never been well received here. APL (talk) 19:34, 22 December 2014 (UTC)
 * Except when posed by drive-bys. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 19:52, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Those two concepts are not mutually exclusive; they are not contradictory. The Fifth Amendment provides that the government cannot force/require you to incriminate yourself.  In other words, if they (the government) want to prove that you committed a crime, they have to do the job themselves; they can't force/require you to do their job for them.  As far as Miranda warnings: despite the Fifth Amendment, a person can freely choose to incriminate himself (of his own volition, without the government forcing or requiring him to do so).  The Miranda warnings are simply "reminding" you that if you do choose to make statements (which you are not required to do), then those statements can be used against you later on in court.   Makes sense to you now?   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:11, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah thanks for that. 49.225.24.158 (talk) 05:14, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * You're welcome. You stated: "If the 5th Amendment of the US Constitution states that you cannot self incriminate ...".  This is where your error in thinking lies.  The Fifth Amendment does not say that you cannot self-incriminate.  It says that you cannot be forced to self-incriminate (by the governmental authorities).  However, without force, you can freely choose to self-incriminate, if you want to.  For example, by confessing to a crime or by placing yourself at the scene of a crime.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 05:15, 22 December 2014 (UTC)


 * This is covered in Miranda v. Arizona and offshoots. The idea was to prevent coerced confessions. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:10, 22 December 2014 (UTC)