Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2012 May 26

= May 26 =

Kim Il-sung and sinking of the RMS Titanic
Why did the birth of Kim Il-sung coincide with the sinking of the RMS Titanic? 27.65.158.41 (talk) 27.65.158.41 (talk) 11:15, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Coincidence. So many things happen in the world, it is inevitable that some coincide.    D b f i r s   11:35, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * It probably is but do we actually know if it's his birthday? (To be clear, I'm not saying there's anything surprising about such a coincidence.) The article doesn't mention any real details, and there doesn't seem to be the level of legend as there is around Kim Jong-il but the article does suggest most details come from Kim Il-sung himself. I'm not saying he chose the date for that or any reason (liking the date for example) or even at random, but I'm not sure what level of record keeping they had back then particularly since his family apparently moved around, so it's possible it's simply coming from him. On the other hand, Korean birthday celebrations suggests birthdays are important in Korea so it's possible/likely? he would have known it even without records, and it seems possible it was well known before he had any desire to invent such details. (Perhaps he knew it in the Korean calendar, but it would be easy to work out the Gregorian date.) Nil Einne (talk) 14:54, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * This coincidence is nothing. All these people died on the same day too:

Thomas Andrews, Jr. 39, Irish shipbuilder and architect John Jacob Astor IV, 47, American businessman and multi-millionaire Archibald Butt, 46, former presidential aide to Theodore Roosevelt Thomas Byles, 42, English-born Catholic priest Jacques Futrelle, 37, French author Benjamin Guggenheim, 46, American businessman Charles Melville Hays, 55, President of Grand Trunk Railway William McMaster Murdoch, 39, First Officer Henry B. Harris, 45, American theatrical producer Wallace Hartley, 33 violinist and band leader F. D. Millet, 65, American painter Jack Phillips, 25, senior wireless officer Edward J. Smith, 62, Captain William Thomas Stead, 62, English journalist Isidor Straus, 67, German-born owner of Macy's and former U.S. Congressman Ida Straus, 63, wife of Isidor Straus J. B. Thayer, 49, American cricketer George Dennick Wick, 58, American steel manufacturer George D. Widener, 50, American hotel magnate


 * I think there's something special relating to this day. OsmanRF34 (talk) 15:03, 26 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Um can you use small print for jokes, as you know that's an obvious non coincidence. Nil Einne (talk) 15:07, 26 May. 2012 (UTC)
 * Ask any astrologer if you believe this is a joke.


 * If you can combine any two completely unrelated events, you are likely to find many coincidences, since you have a huge pool of combinations of two events from which to choose. What's more unusual is when two closely related events, which are still independent, still coincide.  For example, the death dates of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both being on July 4th, 1826 (which is a triple coincidence with the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence).  Although, conceivable, they might have each tried to hold on til the other was gone. StuRat (talk) 15:53, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * "Tried to hold on"? What does that mean, Stu?  Can anyone really avoid the onset of their own death by "trying to hold on"?  I think that's a Hollywood fantasy. --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  21:53, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I think some people can affect the time of their own death by a few hours or days. Take somebody who is not getting enough air due to lung failure.  By breathing deeper than normal, they can stay alive for a while, but this is exhausting.  Just when they choose to give up breathing so heavily depends on them. StuRat (talk) 22:05, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * There are numerous examples of people holding on when their daughter is 8 months pregnant so that they can see their grandchild, or holding on until just after a family wedding, etc.. Of course, you can never know for sure when they would have died otherwise - you just have what their doctor says. It's perfectly plausible, though. People near death often have episodes where things get much worse and then get temporarily better again. They can often fight to stay alive during those episodes, but only if they have sufficient motivation. Since they are suffering and know they aren't going to live much longer anyway, it's often some external motivation (like a family event) that keeps them going. Once that motivation is gone, they don't fight any more and the next time they have one of those episodes, they die. --Tango (talk) 14:30, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * And, of course, in a modern context, a person's decision about whether to go on a respirator or sign a "do not resuscitate" order, etc., will be influenced by if they feel "ready to go". StuRat (talk) 16:39, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * I know from observation that some folks, at least, have enough energy left to "will" themselves to stick around for a little while, such as to wait for the family to gather. Others, however, can "will" themselves to die, it seems. That is, they stop trying to stay alive. And sometimes mother nature has a way of intervening in either approach. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 04:56, 28 May 2012 (UTC)


 * That seems like a very wishy-washy conclusion, Bugs&mdash;people can stay, or go, as they wish, except when they can't? Doing a little bit of research, I find Skala, J.A., and Freedland, K.E. (2004) "Death Takes a Raincheck" Psychosomatic Medicine 66:382-386.  The authors surveyed 18 previous studies that sought correlations between death dates and the times before, after, or around significant events (principally birthdays and major religious holidays).  Their conclusion was that "Research over the past 3 decades has failed to provide convincing evidence that psychological phenomena such as "giving up" or "holding on" can influence the timing of death." TenOfAllTrades(talk) 21:05, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Strictly personal observation. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 23:54, 28 May 2012 (UTC)


 * What makes the story is that Adams' last words were, supposedly, "Thomas Jefferson survives", although in fact Jefferson had died several hours earlier. FiggyBee (talk) 04:31, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Then there's November 22, 1963 - Aldous Huxley, John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, which Peter Kreeft turned into a dialog about the afterlife, Between Heaven and Hell. Dru of Id (talk) 16:02, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * My favourite almost double coincidence is between Hermann Goering and Alfred Rosenberg. They were both born on 12 January 1893.  Both were leading lights in the Third Reich, both were convicted at Nuremberg, and both were sentenced to hang on 16 October 1946.  Rosenberg was hanged, and Goering would also have gone to the gallows that day had he not taken poison in his cell the previous night.  Spoilsport.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  20:19, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Just on that point: I've done a lot of private work over the past 25 years (and I mean a lot) on coincident dates of notable events etc, but I have yet to come across a single case of two notable people who were born on exactly the same day and died on exactly the same day. I exclude cases like  Chang and Eng Bunker.  If anybody knows of such a case, I would be most interested to hear about it.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  00:06, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * Interesting question. You would also need to exclude folks like the 2 Nazis mentioned above, as they would have died on the same day, but not of natural causes, i.e. purposeful rather than coincidental. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:41, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I can see where you're coming from, but I wouldn't do that. If Goering had taken the poison after midnight rather than before, that would work for me.  Even if he'd gone to the gallows as scheduled, that would still be OK, because it was his own actions that led to the conviction and sentence.  I exclude the Bunkers because they shared the same body - it was impossible for them not to have been born the same day, which already makes it a trivial case.  I do have a couple of cases of people who were born within 24 hours of each other and died within 24 hours of each other, but because of different time zones the dates don't match up, and that wrecks it.  --  ♬  Jack of Oz  ♬  [your turn]  13:28, 29 May 2012 (UTC)
 * I see. Kind of "with an asterisk", as if, for example, they had died in the same auto accident or something. I would think there would be at least one reasonably-public database somewhere with lots and lots of individuals' birth and death dates, and if so, it should be a simple matter to query that database. Although I'm guessing you've already tried that. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 00:56, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

economy
Wich are the 20 biggest economies of the world ? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.245.42.135 (talk) 17:44, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * Do you want nations, groups like the EU, or something else ? StuRat (talk) 17:45, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

List of countries by GDP (nominal) is a good start. There are a variety of ways of measuring 'biggest' - does a country that has a huge GDP per-capita but a small population count as bigger than one that has as low GDP per-capita but has a huge population? Anyhoo the article I've linked to has links to a variety of measures, including List of countries by GDP (PPP), List of countries by GDP (PPP) per capita. ny156uk (talk) 18:39, 26 May 2012 (UTC)


 * And then there's the legend that the US state of California has a bigger economy than 80% of the countries of the world... or that IBM has a bigger economy than Greece... so to agree with StuRat, I think the OP needs to clarify what they're meaning but be a bit more expansive. --TammyMoet (talk) 08:22, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * The California thing isn't a legend. If you compare California's GDP with those of countries, using the same definition of GDP, you do find that California has a bigger GDP than most countries. Comparisons between companies and countries is usually due to a misunderstanding. They compare the market capitalisation of a company (which is the present value of all its expected future profits) with the GDP of a country (which is its production is one year). Those are not comparable figures, since they are in different units (one is in dollars, the other in dollars per year). If they happen to be equal, that's just because of the arbitrary choice of a year as the time period for measuring GDP, if you used a different time period they wouldn't be equal any more. A more appropriate comparison is between revenue and GDP - IBM's revenue last year was $106 billion (according to the infobox on IBM). That puts is somewhere around Bangladesh. Greece is about 3 times bigger (or was, it's shrunk quite a lot recently, although not enough to bring it down to IBM's size). IBM's market cap today is $224 billion, so I can believe that its market cap was roughly equal to Greece's GDP sometime recently, but as I said, that's an meaningless comparison. --Tango (talk) 14:43, 27 May 2012 (UTC)


 * GDP is a value-added measure, not revenue. A more appropriate comparison might be profits (as a proxy for value-added) vs. GDP. DOR (HK) (talk) 08:18, 28 May 2012 (UTC)
 * But GDP includes domestic consumption, so I don't think it's analogous to profit. I'd say the closest thing to a country's profit is its current account surplus. I suppose GDP is more like gross profit, if you consider the domestic consumption as being the overhead. --Tango (talk) 11:25, 28 May 2012 (UTC)