Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 August 26

= August 26 =

SIPAYI LAHALA
Can any of the respected people provide me with some information about the SIPAYI LAHALA? It is very urgent!117.199.8.93 (talk) 10:51, 26 August 2013 (UTC) The question applies to Kerala, India.


 * Do you mean the movie? --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  10:57, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

what are the difference between amalgamation merger joint venture ? pl explain in table form with examples and concepts of assets,etc
what are the difference between amalgamation merger joint venture ? pl explain in table form with examples and concepts of assets,etc — Preceding unsigned comment added by Adfsgf (talk • contribs) 13:09, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Welcome to . Your question appears to be a homework question. I apologize if this is a misinterpretation, but it is our aim here not to do people's homework for them, but to merely aid them in doing it themselves. Letting someone else do your homework does not help you learn nearly as much as doing it yourself. Please attempt to solve the problem or answer the question yourself first. If you need help with a specific part of your homework, feel free to tell us where you are stuck and ask for help. If you need help grasping the concept of a problem, by all means let us know.
 * SteveBaker (talk) 13:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * SteveBaker (talk) 13:13, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Consolidation (business), Mergers and acquisitions, Joint venture. 163.202.48.126 (talk) 14:42, 26 August 2013 (UTC)

Summarize lost
Can someone summarize Lost in three lines to me? (includign the last episode). Everyone talks about it but I do not understand it.


 * I think this is a question asking for personal opinion. Everyone might have a defferent summary for you. I understood the show but I din't like it, others might find it interesting... it depends. Probably this is the best place where you can find your answer here in Wikipedia: Lost_(TV_series) Miss Bono  [zootalk]  16:11, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Plane crashes on an island. Survivors go on various adventures.  Hilarity ensues.  -- Jayron  32  16:22, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Plane crashes on island. Mystic shenanigans ensue.  Show loses its own plot and should have finished a long time before the end.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:37, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Too strong: Maybe plane crashed on island. Maybe it was all a dream.  Maybe they all died and the show happened in heaven?.  Er...maybe.  SteveBaker (talk) 01:31, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The bottom line (sorry more than three sentences) is that in the first episode a plane crashes on an island - it starts off as a typical "surviving on an island" show - but rapidly they introduce crazy complicated plot elements - an entire cave full of diagrams and equations and stuff...a guy who has to punch a key on an ancient Commodore 64 computer every 13 minutes or the world will end (or something like that). All my friends are tearing their hair out trying to solve these FASCINATING mysteries and layer upon layer of clues and more mysteries.  So far, very good!  Then, the very last series!!!.  Still more mysteries, still more clues...the last few episodes - and we're no nearer an answer.  EVERYONE is glued to the final episode waiting to here how this amazingly complicated (and evidently insanely clever) plot will all come together in the end in a massively clever "AHA!!!" moment...and...it...doesn't...flat out nothing.  "It was all a dream"...or something about that satisfying.  Everyone feels cheated - that they spent the last god-knows-how-many years chatting about the clues and arguing about how this wierd event tied to that weird clue - blogs, mailing lists, forums...then **NOTHING**.  Nobody ever mentions any of the amazing series of tantalizing clues and mysteries - it's a total cop-out from the laziest, cheating team of script writers in the history of television.  At least "Dallas" only wiped out one season with the "It was all a dream" thing.


 * I watched the first two episodes - then missed a couple and decided I'd wait for the entire series to appear on DVD so I could watch it properly. Never did buy the DVD's - and I'm really glad I didn't invest any time with the piece of junk - or I'd probably be after the script writer's blood. SteveBaker (talk) 01:42, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Good thing we have that rule about personal opinion here, or Steve might have told us what he really thinks! —Steve Summit (talk) 23:15, 28 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, and I fear the Under the Dome is headed the same way, although the book apparently had an ending. But Stephen King really doesn't do sci-fi right, he instead gives you mysticism disguised as sci-fi, like in The Stand. StuRat (talk) 01:59, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Sounds like The Sopranos. Eight years of tantalizing plot developments (what ever happened to the Russian gangster who escaped when they took him to the Jersey Pine Barrens to pop him?) that were never resolved; a show so desperate for drama every character is debased (Walnuts kills Adriana instead of letting her go into hiding; you don't know whether to cheer or hate Tony for suffocating the insuferable Christopher); all building up to the biggest non-ending slap in the fan's face ever. μηδείς (talk) 02:41, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, but The Sopranos didn't have one huge mystery we tuned into each week to try to solve, and which went unsolved at the end. StuRat (talk) 03:21, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Exactly. Many (if not most) plot points in The Sopranos were resolved within one or two episodes - and it's not unreasonable that they wanted to leave a few dangling in case they wanted to make another series or a movie or something.  But from what I understand from my friends who are recovering "Lost" addicts - it's hard to find ANY plot points that were ever resolved!  I agree about "The Dome" though - I started to watch it - but after a few episodes it became clear that it's not going to end well...so it's one of those things that relegated to sitting forever in my NetFlicks queue. SteveBaker (talk) 13:34, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Yea, I'm not interested in all the drama with people misbehaving on the show, that's a soap opera, not sci-fi. I would be more interested in the efforts to scientifically investigate the dome.  For example, first you'd want to circumnavigate it, then maybe go to the very top to look for a hole there.  Also, it seemed as if it dropped into position, which would mean it couldn't be a full sphere, but only a hemisphere, perhaps with a very deep cylinder underneath it.  I'd put miners to work to find how deep it goes.  StuRat (talk) 06:03, 30 August 2013 (UTC)

List of Mafia individuals
I need a list of mafia individuals by name under city. I found it once. Do you currently have such a list?

David Genth Geislinge — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.220.135.34 (talk) 17:09, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I wouldn't have thought the Mafia would advertise who was who in their organized crime enterprise. But I easily came across List of Mafia crime families.  How true is it? I know nothing!  Astronaut (talk) 18:46, 26 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Don't list anyone as belonging to a crime family without a very good reliable source or three--otherwise it's defamation and a WP:BLP violation. μηδείς (talk) 00:28, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Also probably violates other rules. You don't want to end up permanently blocked. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:00, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Large numbers of them have been convicted (often multiple times and often for participating in criminal organizations). reliable sources aren't that hard to find. Rmhermen (talk) 15:04, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Listing them as Mafiosi is one thing. What they really resented, when Joe Valachi testified in the early 1960s, was revealing what they called themselves, which was Cosa Nostra (Our Thing). ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:51, 28 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I changed the header from "made men US" (whatever that means) to something at least vaguely resembling the topic. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  05:02, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * See made man (and US :-). ---Sluzzelin talk  05:17, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * The original title was obvious to an American who knows something about the Mob, maybe less so in other countries. I also "anchored" the original title so as not to break links. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 10:20, 29 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I C. Thank you, both.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  10:28, 29 August 2013 (UTC)

Six º of Separation
If I know a person who knows a person who knows X important person. How do i say that? I mean, I have a Six Degrees of Separation number of 3 with X??.. it is confusing.  Miss Bono  [zootalk]  17:58, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * See the article "Six degrees of separation".
 * —Wavelength (talk) 18:04, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * After reading the article. Does I am 3 steps away from X is correct?  Miss Bono  [zootalk]  18:37, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * I think so, or "I'm three degrees seperated from X" or "I have three degrees of seperation from X" if you want to better tie it back to the degrees of seperation concept. I think it really just depends on context - I assume most people saying something like that would probably follow it up with a description of the chain, in which case it becomes very clear what they meant. Jessica Ryan (talk) 18:48, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks, Jessica.   Miss Bono  [zootalk]  18:55, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Sometimes people also talk about "My X-number is 5" or whatever. For example, my "Feynman-number" is 3 because Feynman himself had a Feynman number of zero, one of his students was a 1, the ex-wife of that student is a 2 and when she was (briefly) my girlfriend, that endowed me with a Feynman-number of 3.  However, most people-numbers have special rules for what constituted a "connection".  You see this particularly in mathematics where people talk about their Erdős number where the connections between mathematicians and Paul Erdős have to be made by publishing a paper with them.  Similarly, Bacon number links have to be made through making a movie with someone.  Feynman numbers are established by being taught something you didn't already know...so now your Feynman number is at most 4. SteveBaker (talk) 13:27, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Steve, I'm not sure the generalization of the concept is really something people talk about. The Erdős number is a special case, because of two particular things about Erdős:  (1) he wrote lots of papers with lots of different co-authors, and (2) he was a graph theorist, and this is a graph-theoretical notion.  I think it was the original "named number".  The Bacon thing presumably came about because Kevin Bacon sort of rhymes with separation, leading to the eponymous trivia game, and then someone noticed the similarity and invented the "Bacon number".  But I admit to some speculation here. --Trovatore (talk) 03:58, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure where I heard the "Feynman number" thing - but the idea was that he was a great teacher (and a great originator of ideas) - so being taught something by Feynman is considered to be something special - and being taught by someone who was taught it by Feynman was (somewhat jokingly) considered to be almost as good - and so forth. Anyway, I've bumped into a handful of people over the years who already knew their Feynman number - so the concept is out there - although I've not seen any reference to it in print or online.  Anyway - it's just an example of how this concept is being generalized. SteveBaker (talk) 13:10, 28 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Then, for everyone reading your post, that didn't already know your Feynman number was 3, their Feynman number is now 4? Seems too easy... :) SemanticMantis (talk) 15:12, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * I think they have to at least add a comment to the same discussion as him at some point. I think that still makes pretty much everyone on these desks a 4. :-P Jessica Ryan (talk) 19:51, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Wow, I completely missed the last sentence of his explanation. Never mind. Jessica Ryan (talk) 19:52, 27 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Yeah - but since you learned it from SemanticMantis (NF==4) and not me (NF==3) - you therefore already knew this fact before you read the last sentence of my post - so I didn't teach you anything new and you get a Feynman number of 5...which is really kinda pathetic! :-) SteveBaker (talk) 13:10, 28 August 2013 (UTC)

Turkish Wikipedia
I'm shocked to see the main page of the Turkish wikipedia. I think it's "today's picture" and it shows a child with smallpox. Isn't it too scary and inappropriate?--77.0.104.38 (talk) 19:35, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * It would only have got there by common consensus among the users who decide those pictures.
 * In any case, this is not the place to be asking about this. This is the Reference Desk for the English version of Wikipedia, and there is no reference we could possibly provide.  Each Wikipedia operates essentially autonomously, and users on Turkish WP are in no better position to be making decisions about anything on English WP than would be the case the other way around.  Namely, no position at all.
 * Also, it's an opinion question, and we don't do opinion questions here. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:32, 26 August 2013 (UTC)


 * What we can say, though, is that different cultures have very different attitudes towards displaying the dead and dying. The "hide them away from the public" attitude is not shared by all. StuRat (talk) 02:01, 27 August 2013 (UTC)


 * The same photo File:Child with Smallpox Bangladesh.jpg was picture of the day at Commons 4 August 2009. At Featured picture candidates/Smallpox it also became a featured picture at the English Wikipedia but it hasn't been today's featured picture on the main page. It's listed as "Too graphic" at Picture of the day/Unused where it isn't even displayed, but it's shown at Wikipedia Signpost/2010-11-08/Features and admins. PrimeHunter (talk) 02:30, 27 August 2013 (UTC)