Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2007 December 16

= December 16 =

Can a girl sing in the male range?
I know some boys can reach female range by using a falsetto but is it possible for girls to sing in the male range? 67.8.199.77 (talk) 01:30, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * There is some overlap I think. See vocal range. Friday (talk) 01:34, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Absolutely. The contralto voice overlaps the tenor range, and some contraltos even compete with baritones.  Sir Thomas Beecham said of Dame Clara Butt that on a fine day her voice could be heard across the English Channel.  --  JackofOz (talk) 01:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * There are a few all-female a cappella groups, such as Zap Mama or The Mint Juleps (UK-based, no article), where one member sings the bass part. Of course they don't go as deep as John Mills, but it works well as a bass line. There have been a couple of female jazz vocalists with deep voices too, Carmen McRae and Cassandra Wilson for example, but even Sarah Vaughan sometimes sang really low notes, and so did Yma Sumac, in her grotesque and unforgettable fashion. And Cher often sang lower than Sonny in their duets. ---Sluzzelin talk  03:34, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * One of the Pointer Sisters sang quite low if memory serves. &mdash;Tamfang (talk) 03:48, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Some prepubescent boys can reach as high of notes as girls can without going into falsetto. Saukkomies 04:04, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Tionne Watkins of TLC (band) sang low too, especially in their hit song Red Light Special. Oda Mari (talk) 14:36, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Speaking as a contralto in an all-female a capella group, yes. :) I'm not a remarkable one, but through this sort of involvemet I'm definitely in a position to have heard some, and holy cow. One of our girls is basically a tenor. --Masamage ♫ 01:44, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

lost code
my daughter lost the booklet were u get the code to install the game the sims2 seasons —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.196.213.67 (talk) 02:27, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Google Sims2 Seasons/cheat codes. May be there. 205.240.146.37 (talk) 02:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Google Sims2 serial. Will be there. ⁪ffroth  06:12, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * write a letter to the manufacturer. perhaps they will give you a new one if you ask very nicely. Elvis (talk) 19:29, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

How to DISAPPEAR
Go to skeptictank.org/hs/vanish.htm

Question is this:" Does this really work ?!" It also has tips about labor unions and certain "Animal Rights" organizations, such as PETA, ALF, and other Eco-Terrorist groups. 205.240.146.37 (talk) 02:37, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * There used to be until last year a very fascinating publishing company called Loompanics based out of Washington state that published books on all kinds of topics, including a number of them on how to change one's identity, etc. Paladin Press has said they'll pick up some of Loompanics titles, but I am not sure which ones these are. You might be able to find used Loompanics books on E-Bay or in used and rare bookstores.
 * Another source for this sort of thing is the magazine published in Oregon called Green Anarchy.
 * As far as telling you that "this really works", I'm afraid I am not going to do that. My interest in this subject is one of curiosity, and although Loompanics has books that talk about doing illegal or quasi-illegal things, I would never myself do any of them, and would never advise someone else to do them either. If you want to know whether it is really possible to dissappear, just look at some cases like Theodore Kaczynski the Unabomber, or Warren Jeffs the polygamist outlaw, or others who tried to assume fake identities and dissappear. If The Man wants you, you're probably not going to be able to hide forever. Although there have been some people who have gotten away with it for a very long time, such as the fascinating story of Kathleen Soliah, a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army who dissappeared and became a soccer mom in Minnesota until the authorities finally caught up with her almost 25 years later. She's now serving time in prison. Saukkomies 04:31, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * A major difficulty, of course, is that as time goes on information about people becomes more and more interconnected into centralized databases. 100 years ago you could move to another state and have a reasonably good chance of passing off a new name and identity; today every little thing you try to do—get a job, get a credit card, open up a bank account, buy a plane ticket, etc.—requires multiple forms of identification, bureaucratic numbers (social security, for example), and having all sorts of information (tax, consumer, etc.) plugged into big ol' databases that could hypothetically be used to triangulate an identity even if the name wasn't the same at all. Anyway, I've just skimmed the article, but the basic message seems to be "be totally paranoid, all the time, and always feel like you are on the run," which sounds about right to me. The second you want to do something like settle down, stop running, get a steady income, see family and friends, etc., that's when you're going to get nabbed. Being on the run does not sound like something that most people could pull off for any amount of time; it requires a LOT of work. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 15:18, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I haven't trawled through all the stuff at that website, but it looks like it's mostly rubbish with a bit of common sense thrown in. Thousands of people disappear without trace every year, and no doubt a proportion of those are deliberate. As long as you have plenty of cash and don't do anything like buy property, fly, or run a business or a car, and don't ever want to see friends or family again, it should be very easy.--Shantavira|feed me 15:32, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I read a fair chunk of it - I'd be very surprised if the person or people writing it actually know any of those things for sure. It seemed like a bunch of random ideas culled from a couple of dozen movie scripts rather than anything real. SteveBaker (talk) 20:36, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * And a fair amount of CSI. But yeah, I think the real problem in "disappearing" has nothing to do with licking stamps and wearing a hat indoors. If they know enough to suspect you of being someone else, to the point where they'd take the time to do forensic checks, then you've already screwed up. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:21, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

I actually have the Loompanics "How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found". One of the central hints in the book is that it is much, much, much easier to disappear from the wife and in-laws that from The Man. Maintaining the new identity is partly a function of how badly someone wants to find you. A pissed off ex- might spend a couple of grand on a private eye and they'll likely find you if you didn't know what you were doing, but might fail if you're careful or lucky. All that changes if you are WANTED. You can't change your DNA or your fingerprints and there are all kinds of supercomputers buzzing back and forth trying to make matches work out. Unless you're planning on living off the land as a hermit out where nobody would care to look, you're eventually going to get connected (and busted). The first step in successfully disappearing is to not have too many people looking for you in the first place. Matt Deres (talk) 00:08, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

BRAIN DRAIN
Does LSD "melt your brain"? I have heard this a lot and wanted to know if it is true and what it really does. Not neccesarily just to your perosnality, but to your "smarts" or maybe even yopur abiltiy to perceive. I haev also heard that it makes you start becoming mentally retarded and causes brain damage. Is this true? Thanks —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.23.79.10 (talk) 02:51, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Have you tried reading the article Lysergic acid diethylamide? There's a whole section on "Effects". In my experience, no, it doesn't "melt" your brain, or make you stupid, but you can become very confused on it, and if you have too much, especially in combination with other drugs, you may stay that way for years. It can also complicate pre-existing mental health conditions, which is nothing to sneeze at. There have certainly been intelligent and talented people who stayed that way after taking lots of LSD, and there have been other people who were pretty damaged by their experiences with the drug. -GTBacchus(talk) 03:12, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You only get one brain - do you really want to take the chance? SteveBaker (talk) 04:08, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * As summarized here, LSD does not cause any physical damage but can exacerbate pre-existing psychological conditions. Someoneinmyheadbutit&#39;snotme (talk) 19:10, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

90% consume, 9% do bits of work, and 1% do most of the work
What's the principle, which applies to Wikipedia amongst many voluntary-type things, whereby the vast majority of people only make use of what others have produced, the majority of the remainder only do a little of the work, and almost all the work is done by a tiny number of people?

Are there any statistics of this principle as regards Wikipedia?

Thanks, --86.149.55.247 (talk) 13:22, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * It sounds a lot like Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged. SaundersW (talk) 13:24, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thanks, but I've just now looked through both the Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged articles and I can't see anything indicating this principle. --86.149.55.247 (talk) 13:38, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * This does sound like Rand's Atlas Shrugged, you can see more of her ideas at The Fountainhead article and in the Objectivism (Ayn Rand) article. -Yamanbaiia (talk) 13:47, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Facts: (List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits gives details for the top 4,000 editors)
 * A total of 187 million edits have ever been made to Wikipedia, of those:
 * 6 people have made more than 100,000 edits.
 * 11 people have made more than 90,000 edits.
 * 18 people have made more than 80,000 edits.
 * 31 people have made more than 70,000 edits.
 * 56 people have made more than 60,000 edits,
 * 88 people have made more than 50,000 edits,
 * 147 people have made more than 40,000 edits,
 * 282 people have made more than 30,000 edits,
 * 648 people have made more than 20,000 edits,
 * 1860 people have made more than 10,000 edits,
 * ...and more than 4000 people made more than 5,000 edits.
 * We have 6 million registered users - and an unknown number of anonymous users who also edit, but I'd guess that there must be at least another 6 million. An awful lot of edits seem to come from people without accounts.  So let's guess that we have 12 million editors altogether.  So we should probably guess that the average number of edits per user is probably about 15.


 * Conclusions:
 * (Rough figures)
 * The top ten editors alone made over 1.8 million edits, so one millionth of the editors made 1% of the edits.
 * The top 2000 editors made close to 18 million edits, so one six thousandth of the editors made 10% of the edits.
 * Extrapolating the data above by a small amount leads me to estimate that 1% of editors probably made about a quarter of the edits. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SteveBaker (talk • contribs) 15:24, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * The average number of edits per person is probably around 15...but the typical number of edits per person is probably a lot less.


 * So it's clear that a very large fraction of the edits are made by a ridiculously small fraction of the editors. However, because we don't have statistics for the distribution of edit counts for everyone - and we don't know how many anonymous users there are, it's impossible to count how much work is being done at the bottom end.  Worse still, there are automated edits made by 'bots' who don't appear in the list above - but do count into the total 187 million edits, it's possible that the "majority" of the work is being done automatically.  Also, a lot of the users are doing "negative work" - vandalizing, putting junk into the articles, starting articles about themselves...all sorts of things that count as "edits" but don't help.  For some very popular articles (eg "Computer" before it was semi-protected), 90% of the edits are vandalism or vandalism reversion.  Lots of people (many of the people here for example) make "edits" that are not directly related to the encyclopedia itself but to the 'support system' - policy and guidelines, admin, reference desks, help desks, the Wikipedia 'newspaper' and so on.
 * SteveBaker (talk) 14:32, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Number of edits is one thing to count. Check out Who writes Wikipedia?. -GTBacchus(talk) 18:48, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * That article is horribly wrong. It's clearly more than a year out of date because the web site posted it in September of 2006 - but even back then, it had to be off by a mile.  It says: "50% of all the edits are done by just .7% of the users ... 524 people"...Well, if 524 is 0.7% then "the people" is 75,000 people.  But there are currently six million user accounts on Wikipedia...and even as long as a year ago, there must have been a LOT more than 75,000.  Furthermore, if you add up the numbers today, the top 500 people are responsible for about 16 million edits between them.  That's less than 10% - certainly nowhere near 50%.   That article was published in September 2006 - but it must have been written based on statistics from back in 2002 or so for there to have  been only 75,000 accounts. SteveBaker (talk) 20:14, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Huh. Would you disagree with the writer's conclusion in general, that a lot of content is contributed by IPs and then edited and formatted heavily by regulars? -GTBacchus(talk) 22:45, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, given that we know that the basic facts in the article are either wrong - or very, very out of date - I'm not inclined to believe any conclusions that might be based on those incorrect/outdated facts. If you know of sources of up-to-date statistics that prove this then let's hear it. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I haven't got the statistics, but I feel that I've observed the dynamic the author describes in that article. I was just asking in my last post whether you've also made that observation; or perhaps you're suspending judgment on that point until you see some better statistics? -GTBacchus(talk) 19:24, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

&mdash; Many thanks all. Those stats from SteveBaker are especially useful. I'll up the other refs. etc. as well. --86.149.55.247 (talk) 19:21, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Note that number of "edits" is not necessarily a good measure. There is a big difference between small edits and major writing. I recall reading not too long ago that only a few dozen editors were responsible for most of the content (discounting bots, discounting typo fixing, discounting edit wars and user pages). But I can't remember where I read that. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 23:19, 16 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Certainly you're right about that. There are plenty of editors who simply treat Wikipedia as a chat site - or engage solely in politics and never do much "productive" editing - and there are those who provide valuable contributions in places like these Reference Desks - but don't add much content to articles.  So, yeah - it's possible that we have some skew in those numbers because of that.  Also, we can't really tell which edits are valuable and which aren't.  If someone corrects a minor grammar infraction by changing one word, is that as "valuable" as someone who corrects the average litter size of a European Red Squirrel from 6 (wrong) to 4 (correct) by changing one character?  Even huge contributions of entire sections of text may not be as valuable as the addition of a key reference for a possibly dubious fact.  We can't measure those values - so we have no possible way to guess at the "value" of IP contributors, logged in contributors and the very frequent contributors.  So - we have to fall back on edit counts or something like that. SteveBaker (talk) 03:41, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * Well, it's not impossible to come up with a methodology on "valuable" edits, if you assume that "valuable" edits persist (in a Darwinian fashion) longer than those which are not valuable. If you had the whole database on your machine, and built a program which could crunch the numbers, I bet you could break it down even further. (That would be a heck of a more interesting PhD thesis than the endless number of people petitioning administrators to take their "is editing Wikipedia exciting?" on a 7-point scale from "yes" to "no" pointless data gathering quizzes.) --24.147.86.187 (talk) 14:16, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
 * As I said, it depends on your definition of "valuable". The problem with the approach you suggest is that a simple grammar or spelling fix may well last a long time - but it's not as "valuable" (at least not in my view) as a factual correction.  If an article has an obvious spelling mistake, that doesn't devalue the article by much - but if you have the wrong birth date for George Bush (or whatever) then the fix for that is incredibly valuable.  Both fixed may stay around for a long time - but you can't automatically determine which was a valuable fix and which a less valuable one.   Worse still, if you fix the president's birthday but it's embedded in a grammatically poor sentence - then your fix for the birthday may well show up in your survey as being "short lived" if someone comes along and rewrites the sentence to fix the grammar.   That's actually a pretty common pattern because when person 'A' fixes a date, it tends to cause person 'B' (who is patrolling the article for vandalism, etc) will look at that change to verify that it's a good one - and in the process may notice a grammatical error that's been there for months in that very same sentence.  If person B then fixes that then person A's edit is "erased" (as far as your statistical software is concerned) and therefore devalued.  This kind of thing happens all the time.  You get an article that's been sitting there with no changes for months - then someone will make one tiny change and it'll cause a cascade of other improvements that can last for several days as editors who are merely patrolling the article are provoked into giving it another look.


 * Take for example, the Red Squirrel article (I picked it out of the air - it happens to be the first article I ever edited on Wikipedia - before I even registered a username).


 * The article is only edited rather sporadically - it sometimes goes for months without changes. It happened to be mentioned in response to a question on the Science Reference Desk here on Dec 8th.  The article had not been edited for nearly two weeks prior to that.  But the consequence of that one mention was that our very own User:Milkbreath evidently read the article for the first time - saw that it could use some cleanup - and made a dozen reasonable-looking copy-edits to the article.  Mostly minor stuff - all pretty valid.  A large number of revisions were to de-capitalise the words "Red Squirrel" to "red squirrel" - the article originally having a messy mixture of the two capitalisation styles.  This caused User:UtherSRG (a long time editor of that article) to revert everything Milkbreath did (rather heavy-handedly, I might say!)...but a day later UtherSRG evidently thought more carefully about it and went back and made a whole bunch of copy-edits to consistantly have "Red Squirrel" instead of an ugly mixture of the two.  Milkbreath goes in again the following day and de-capitalises them.  UrtherSRG reverts.  This activity in the article evidently wakes up a patroller of the article and User:Fluri enters the scene - reverting UrtherSRG and thereby putting back all of Milkbreaths changes.  Fluri explains in the edit summary for the reversion that the Wikipedia Manual of Style says that Milkbreath is right (Yeaaah! Go Team Ref Desk!)...and the debate ends there.


 * Now, tell me - who made the "valuable contribution"? How is your statistical software going to spot that Milkbreath's contribution "stuck" and not award points for the changes to Fluri?  Fluri's only real contribution was in pursuading UrtherSRG that Milkbreath was right - and all of the value of Fluri's contribution was in the edit summary "These changes follow the WP:MOS -- Surely this is not a case of WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT".  So Milkbreath did the grunt work - but Fluri made it stick.  UrtherSRG isn't a bad editor - he/she simply didn't know the WP:MOS rule for naming animal species - but those dozen good-faith edits that UrtherSRG made on the basis of a misunderstanding will count for nothing - no more than vandalism would.  So who gets credit?


 * Edit counts are not a perfect measure of "value of contribution" - but anything short of a detailed article-by-article review isn't going to be any better.


 * SteveBaker (talk) 15:03, 17 December 2007 (UTC)


 * My point was not to argue that this was a totally rigorous solution, but that it would be much more valuable than just edit counts. In any case, you'd obviously have to write something clever enough to distinguish revert wars from regular edits in order to properly attribute authorship. I don't think that aspect would be that hard. But again, I think any real metric would be looking at the bulk of content and the persistence of its existence. To try and hash out the factual validity of the content would be a totally different question, a different one than the initial one about who edits Wikipedia. I respectfully disagree that you couldn't do any better than edit counts in terms of statistical number crunching. Edit counts will tell you that a bot is the best Wikipedia editor ever; an analysis of the type I suggested would instead indicate that a (human) editor who wrote lots of content that survived for a long time was a better editor than a bot. And I think that would be meaningful, even if it doesn't capture every nuance of editing and edit wars on Wikipedia. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or in this case, the better. --24.147.86.187 (talk) 01:46, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

And of course the number of edits is much less important than the value.Someone who has made only a couple of hundred edits-all them helpful,productive and useful-is in my opinion more of an asset to Wikipedia than someone who has made 10,000 edits,most of which are inserting garbage,arguing with other editors and pointless edit wars. Lemon martini (talk) 11:52, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

climate
I am trying to find out what the climate was like in 1779 around the San Diego de Alcala mission.Upmike1074 (talk) 22:09, 16 December 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Upmike1074 (talk • contribs) 22:09, 16 December 2007 (UTC)
 * I did a bit of poking around, and I'm starting to think that there wasn't much in the way of meteorological record-keeping going on there then. If you really mean "climate", I'd say the chances are good that it was a lot like it is now, perhaps a little cooler. Whether 1779 was an unusual weather year I haven't been able to find out. --Milkbreath (talk) 16:46, 17 December 2007 (UTC)