Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2022 April 7

= April 7 =

Nobody Mose the trouble I've seen
Are Mose (scribe) and Mose (Ancient Egyptian official) the same person? They were both around during the reign of Ramesses II. Clarityfiend (talk) 06:51, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * I read Military of ancient Egypt and Scribe and I'm still not sure. I want to say that scribes were basically all inheriting their jobs from their fathers, and weren't royalty, while officers and captains in the military were princes and thus also inherited the right to their positions – but they weren't necessarily princes, and were expected to be well-educated and good at diplomatic speaking, so there's nothing to stop the commander in chief from saying "that scribe is now an officer and his new duty is to hit the Hittites". Card Zero  (talk) 15:12, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Eine besondere Ehrung für den ägyptischen Soldaten Mose (A special honor for the Egyptian soldier Moses) from Hildesheim. DE has de:Stele des Mose and i don't see any links to de:Mose (19. Dynastie). Probably should not be citing The Exodus Decoded. fiveby(zero) 16:27, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Here's Kenneth Anderson Kitchen cited in de:Stele des Mose for translation discussing Moses as an Egyptian name: We also have a very many Egyptians who were actully called just "Mose"... and the most famous would be Mose (scribe). Here's i think third scribe Mose, with the author stating: ...the names and titles of Meryre and Mose are commonplace.... fiveby(zero) 17:27, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Okay, so it's just a common name. Who knew? Hi, I'm Larry, and this is my scribe Mose and my other scribe Mose. Thanks all. Clarityfiend (talk) 19:29, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Yazidis
Is it true that Yazidis will not eat lettuce for religious reasons? What are they like with curly endive? Thanks. 86.188.121.114 (talk) 11:45, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Some of them won't. Others will. See Yazidism. Nanonic (talk) 13:13, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * But that says cabbage (and the BBC source used there makes no mention of that vegetable). And is it because one of their patriarchs was reputed to have been murdered by using that vegetable? 86.188.121.114 (talk) 14:41, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * How do you murder somebody with a cabbage? --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:38, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I blame Sauerkraut {although that paper does seem to argue the reverse), it can be fatal. Martinevans123 (talk) 21:52, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Perhaps by adopting fruit-based methods? --47.147.118.55 (talk) 22:48, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

This portrait of Jean Picard appears pixelated
It kinda resembles a large Minecraft painting. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 13:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * It is a jpeg, a type of digital image that uses Lossy compression, which is to say that when images are compressed, for say scaling, the information used to compress them is "lost"; undoing the compression introduces errors and artifacts not in the original image. What this looks like is that someone took a very small jpeg image of a painting and enlarged it greatly.  Jpegs are a type of raster graphic, which is to say the image is stored as a series of individual pixels with data about the color of each pixel.  When you blow up a raster graphic larger than it's original size (as appears to have been done here), the pixelation becomes obvious, since now you have a large square cluster of pixels all having the same color as the original image.  This kind of thing is less of a problem using lossless compression formats such as PNG graphics, which would still suffer from some pixelation at high magnifications.  SVG and other vector graphics formats are much more scalable than raster graphics, but have their own problems when representing realistic images, as they don't efficiently handle the subtle irregularities of real life the way that raster graphics can.  -- Jayron 32 13:38, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Jpegs use the Discrete cosine transform, which involves superimposing a lot of waves so that those can be stored instead of the pixel information.
 * This is tied to specific-sized blocks of pixels, so yes, it's a raster format, but the Compression artifacts that result reveal the boundaries of those blocks, rather than a case of the jaggies like Jean Picard is suffering from here.
 * PNG graphics specify individual pixels losslessly, but would suffer from the same problem if you upscaled one using the nearest-neighbor algorithm.
 * SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) is indeed scalable, can confirm. Card Zero  (talk) 14:18, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the corrections. I was doing my best to generalize from non-specialist knowledge on the differences between raster and vector graphics (both are useful for different reasons) and I appreciate the better details you gave on each format.  -- Jayron 32 14:20, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I enjoy those rare moments on the ref desk when I don't feel like I'm winging it. :) Card Zero  (talk) 14:36, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * When I say "doing my best to generalize from non-specialist knowledge", what I really mean is "winging it". -- Jayron 32 14:37, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * As far as the original image goes, the image the OP linked is a really shitty crop from File:Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667.PNG by Henri Testelin. Picard appears to be 6th from the left along the top row of figures.  File:Picard, La Hire, Cassini I.jpg, a better crop, seems to imply that the portly man next to Picard is Philippe de La Hire, and the man in the fantastic wig in front of him is Giovanni Domenico Cassini.  Can't confirm any of those, however, or even that Picard is correctly identified.  In the OP's image, de la Hire appears to be simply lazily colored over with a uniform brown color.-- Jayron 32 14:35, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Ackshully if you click "more information", the terrible crop says it comes from File:Testelin,_Henri_-_Colbert_Presenting_the_Members_of_the_Royal_Academy_of_Sciences_to_Louis_XIV_in_1667.jpg, which is lower res (and higher contrast, and a bit more pink). It must have been repaired a lot by somebody working away diligently in Paint (or ACDSee according to the metadata). Poor Jean Picard is being menaced from behind by a wall of cloned wig matter. Card Zero  (talk) 14:58, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Regardless, it is still, if I must resort to technical jargon, really shitty. I'll see what I can perhaps dig up for better use in the article in question.  -- Jayron 32 15:07, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Honestly, I can't find anything else. There's some mis-labeled engravings of a Johannes Andreas Piccart (this guy), who is a contemporary of our Jean Picard, but is not him.  -- Jayron 32 15:24, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The first file you linked goes up to 6,000+ pixels wide, so a crop from that ought to do fine, except for the difficulty of removing Philippe de La Hire's intrusive face. The GIMP has a healing brush which might do the trick. Edit: I've more or less done this now, but will need to upload to Commons, I hate that part. So complicated. Card Zero  (talk) 15:34, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I just cropped it from raster copying the above, cropped starting at x:15-y:38 to 168/199 and added a one pixel line in medium gray along the nose using mspaint. It pretty much stands vectorization in the viewer. --Askedonty (talk) 16:24, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I uploaded a new version of the file, which is visible if you click the image above and then click the "description page" link. But the versions of the image on this page and on the Jean Picard article haven't updated, and I don't know what to do to get them to update. Oh, ctrl-F5 (hard refresh) was all it needed: my browser was caching the old version, that's all. Card Zero  (talk) 16:28, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * The new version looks a LOT better. If you refresh your browser cache, it should show up fine for you.  It's showing up for me too.  As a best practice, you should update the image description page at Commons indicating the original file you cropped the image from.  Makes it easier to track provenance.  -- Jayron 32 16:31, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Blargh, I don't think I can do that retrospectively, because it's like trying to edit an edit summary. I put the information in the "caption" field but that seems like the wrong use of the field (whatever it's for, I've never understood), and the link to the file I cropped from doesn't work, it just appears as plain text. Also I can't find the link to the other version of the original painting, now, even though I found that on the wikimedia page somewhere a few minutes ago, and I think I might have overwritten that information. And this is (part of) why I so rarely upload images. Card Zero  (talk) 16:45, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I think I fixed it. I think you can just edit the page at Commons and put information in the summary section.  I updated the source information and the caption.  -- Jayron 32 17:52, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Oh! In source. My eyes were just slipping over that because it had something already written there in French, so it looked like none of my business. Thank you. Card Zero  (talk) 18:18, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I happen to read a bit of French, so it just named the artist and linked the file it was cropped from. I just updated it (in English, because I'm not that confident in my ability to write proper French).  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 18:22, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Speaking of changing image files, I also once had trouble fixing an image. Particularly, at the Globalization article, there was a map of the Silk Road where Macrobia was typed down in a shoddy/cruddy way (You think I will speak French? I will not speak French! Nein!), so I tried to correct it. Not understanding why my corrected version wasn't going through yet, I impatiently kept trying again a couple of times until I decided to upload a new, separate image file altogether. – MrPersonHumanGuy (talk) 21:44, 7 April 2022 (UTC)

Priest having doubts on religion
Would a priest have doubts on Christianity or other religion, like God and organised religion? 86.143.101.46 (talk) 18:03, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * He might. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:36, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Searching wiki articles for “priest doubts” brings up examples, which are mentioned in Corporal of Bolsena and Vincas Mykolaitis-Putinas, among others. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 18:46, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * They say that doubt is a necessary part of faith. Any religious leader worthy of the name would have had their "dark night of the soul", maybe many times. Faith and belief are not carved into the stone of the psyche; they are elusive because humans like seeing evidence for stuff rather than being told something is the case and you just have to believe it. The point being that, if there were evidence, there would be no place for faith or belief. Religious faith is supposed to be a struggle; it's not supposed to be easy. --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  19:52, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Why is it supposed to be a struggle? DuncanHill (talk) 16:57, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Because faith, by definition, requires one to accept as true, matters for which there is no valid evidence. The source of doubt is the lack of evidence.  If I could prove the existence of God using valid methods of gathering and analyzing evidence, that wouldn't be faith.  That would be science.  The lack of evidence causes doubt, faith is to be certain without the lack of evidence.  That conflict between faith and doubt causes struggle, because to be religious is to accept things on faith.  QED.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 18:07, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * So an objectively true religion would not be, by your definition, religious. And you haven't really addressed why it's supposed to be a struggle. It just seems like playing with words to find new ways of saying "because I say so". Why wouldn't or shouldn't a god make it easy for people to believe in it? DuncanHill (talk) 18:19, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * There is no such thing as an "objectively true" religion. --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:21, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I never said there was. DuncanHill (talk) 00:37, 9 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The God of some parts of the Bible like Hebrews 11 and the Gospel mountain telekinesis thing apparently values faith, somewhat like how some people would value a relationship where it's completely trust on faith that the other doesn't want to cheat vs. something else like "trust but verify" or "I'm only 90% sure they never adulterated on one of those James Bond jobs I'm not allowed to know about". The God of other parts of the Bible seems to have no qualms about shoving (in-universe) evidence of the supernatural in peoples' faces like the time the pagan priests and Elijah had a "god-off", an ask their gods to ignite their sacrifices competition in front of many thousands and 450 priests pray to 11 all day and nothing happens then Elijah soaks his beef of 2 bulls offering and enough wood to burn it till 4+ gallons overflow and sky fire completely consumes the beef, wood, stone altar, 4 gallons of altar moat water and some of the surrounding soil. Seemingly to smooth the personality differences the Bible also seems to have an unusual amount of incredibly stupid people who have no faith or don't change their tune despite incredible (in-universe) evidence of the supernatural, like the Revelation dudes who curse God while it's raining hundred pound hail. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:27, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Look, I'm not here to convince you. Faith and doubt are opposite things.  If you have faith, and you also doubt, that is a source of cognitive dissonance.  Cognitive dissonance causes stress, and that stress is what we call "struggling with one's faith".  I'm not trying to convince you that God (or any one kind of God) is real or not, or that you should or shouldn't believe in anything.  I'm explaining the source of the struggle: that to have faith is to believe without evidence, and the lack of evidence causes doubt.  The cognitive dissonance between wanting to believe and doubting one's own beliefs because of the lack of evidence causes cognitive dissonance.  That's the struggle.  I'm defining it for you, I'm not telling you you should or shouldn't experience it.  Or have a religion.  Or not have a religion.  Because that's not what we do here.  The question of what a God should or shouldn't do is not appropriate for this forum.  The topic of "what is meant by the struggle between faith and doubt" can be answered using simple definitions of terms available in reliable sources, dictionaries etc.  Your last question is not.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 18:37, 8 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I was questioning the assertion that "Religious faith is supposed to be a struggle; it's not supposed to be easy" - not the reality of any of your gods, nor was I asking for a definition of the struggle. DuncanHill (talk) 00:37, 9 April 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm somewhat critical of the notion that "faith, by definition, requires one to accept as true, matters for which there is no valid evidence". That's not how the dictionary defines it, and I'm pretty sure that's not how the Bible uses it.  The original, etymological meaning of faith (and still a valid meaning) is "loyalty" (or sometime "trust"), and I'm pretty sure that that is what the Bible usually means when it talks about faith.  According to the Bible, God frequently proved his existence and his willingness to intervene in the world.  But he didn't always do so, and didn't always help out people when they needed it, but expected people to remain loyal to him anyway, rather than going off and worshiping other gods.  As such, it puzzles me that so many Christians these days define faith as "belief without evidence": it always struck me as something an atheist would say as a criticism of faith, rather than something a Christian would defend. Iapetus (talk) 16:06, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
 * It's a more elegant way of restating the saying that "Faith requires believing something that you know is not true." Or more to the point, "can't be proven". If it could be "proven", then there would be only one religion. (Or none at all.) --←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 18:47, 10 April 2022 (UTC)
 * You may be surprised, but this is a popular topic that has numerous sources. Christian atheism is a very real phenomenon. It is estimated that somewhere between 2–30% of ministers and priests are atheists, depending on the sect or denomination. Viriditas (talk) 21:47, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Archbishop of Canterbury admits he has doubts about God. Alansplodge (talk) 21:55, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * It is also worth noting that, among Christian denominations which have priests as clergy, there are hundreds of thousands of such priests. Given such large numbers of priests, that any one of them may have any particular emotional state at any one time is likely to happen.  The OP's question about whether "a priest" may have doubts is so likely to be true for at least a priest among the millions of such priests, that it doesn't bear further proof that one such priest exists.  One can safely assume that one does.  -- Jayron <b style="color:#090">32</b> 11:47, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Thomas the Apostle seems relevant here. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:13, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

In the first Father Ted episode, when Father Dougal McGuire (being mistaken as Father Ted Crilley) was being interviewd on TV, he exprssed his doubts on the religious life, like not knowing if God really exists and not beliveing in organised religion. See Father Ted - S01E01 3/3 - 5:39-5:49 86.143.101.46 (talk) 18:35, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

The Chinese had it right: "To be uncertain is to be uncomfortable. But to be certain is to be ridiculous". And André Gide wrote: "Trust those who seek the truth; doubt those who say they have found it". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  23:24, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

Siam 1885 cession
The map of Siamese territorial cessions seems to indicate territory lost in the north in 1885, yet I was unable to find any such record of such a cession existing. The map cited as reference material also indicates territory lost in the area, labeling it as "Shan States" but gives the date as 1893. Furthermore, other citations for the original map show no territorial cession there at all, and I haven't been able to find anything to back up territorial losses in the region to the British. Is this an issue with the maps? Or am I perhaps missing something obvious? Also I tried to link to the image file but the preview just showed the image file itself which was enormous. It is File:Map of Siam (territorial cessions).svg on wikipedia. 104.246.196.199 (talk) 21:52, 7 April 2022 (UTC)


 * Here's file for you - |thumb added to end makes it small. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 22:21, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Shan States is an article which has the date 1885 in it, in relation to the Third Anglo-Burmese War. It's about parts of Burma, though, and it says the Siamese Shan States were something different, so this looks potentially muddled. Card Zero  (talk) 22:45, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the File! and the tip, very helpful. I didd find the info on the Burmese war but that can't really explain the marked loss as you mentioned. 104.246.196.199 (talk) 23:54, 7 April 2022 (UTC)
 * The area looks to be mostly Kengtung, and the 1885 date probably refers to the British, but see Burmese_resistance_movement_1885–1895 and 1894-5 would be a better date for British control. I'm not sure why that is considered a "Siam 1885 cession". See "The Nonbounded Kingdom" p. 74- and "Overlapping Margins" p. 97- with Lying between Burma, Lanna, and Yunnan, Kengtung was a tributary of both the Burmese and Chinese overlords, and sometimes of Siam,... fiveby(zero) 02:56, 8 April 2022 (UTC)

— This may be of interest:--

“In 1885, following the defeat of Burmese forces in the Third Anglo-Burmese War, the British gained control of Upper Burma and sent the last Burmese king into exile in India. The vast area of the Shan states, which lay between Mandalay and the Mekong, took several years of sporadic military action and travelling diplomacy to pacify. In 1890, the Chief of the large and rebellious Shan state of Kentung accepted British suzerainty, bringing British authority right up to the Mekong, directly opposite the territory that was soon to become part of French Laos. To the south, where a number of micro-states were contested with the Siamese, the Anglo-Siamese boundary commission resolved border uncertainties in early 1893. The two governments exchanged maps setting out the agreed borderline in October 1894.” … “During the 1880s, the movement of Shan into northern Siam accelerated as a result of widespread conflict in the Shan states, brought about in part by the decline in Burmese power resulting from British colonial incursion. The 1882 revolt against Burmese suzerainty by the Shan state of Kentung set in motion a train of events that produced chaos in the region.”

Walker, Andres, "Seditious State-Making in the Mekong Borderlands: The Shan Rebellion of 1902-1904," in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, Vol 29, No. 3 (November 2014), pp 554-590, ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute DOR (HK) (talk) 20:54, 8 April 2022 (UTC)