Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 November 18

= November 18 =

Recalled DePuy Metal on metal hip&metallosis
I do not have health insurance thanks to our lovely Government.I have a Depuy metal on metal hip.It was put in on nov.2006.Last year i went for annual checkup& plasma test.The previous year i went in and got x-rayed he needed to give me an MRI.Got the Mri he said i was forminga bag around my implanted hip. He told me he was Recomended not to do revision surgery at this time.This year on my annual Checkup he took just an X-Ray.Gave me the Plasma Test,Then told me to come back in 2 Weeks and we will talk about getting a new hip with a larger femoral head. well i went home all scared thinking i will have to have revision surgery.Convincing my self i may feel a lot less pain i was on board with it. went to my appt. He tells me i will not get revision surgery.Told me my bag around hip was gone and my metal levels have stabilized.Is this even possible or should i be looking for another surgeon.2 years ago he needed an mri to see this bag now with just an x-ray this year he tells me the bag is gone. My other Question is my urine is redish ,brown,orange I Almost have had Diarea for about 8 months Am i ok? Is this one of the symptoms Of metal poisoning?COBALT and Chromium is what my hip is made of.I am sorry to bother you but i have no where to turn to with out med.Ins.Except to a lawyer.My name is Rick .I thankyou very muchEven if you dont help.And thankyou for the dr oz show i watch it at least 4 times aweek. 70.162.20.74 (talk) 00:40, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Street addresses in the United States
One often sees on tv, movies etc. addresses such as "2589 Green Street", even in small towns where it is inconcievable that there could be over 2500 separate properties on Green Street. The numbering is obviously not simply sequential, so how does it work? Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 07:56, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Some explanations are given in our article on house numbering, subsection "United States and Canada". ---Sluzzelin talk  08:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * The street only needs to be 2.5 miles long. If 911 standardized addresses are used, then the house is 2.5 miles down from the "start" of the road, usually a major cross-street or landmark.  As a former pizza delivery driver, this makes it really easy to find houses in the dark that don't have their number visible/lighted.  Dismas |(talk) 09:01, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 09:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Suburbs of large US cities will someimes adopt the numbering of their central city, resulting in some absurdly high numbering of addresses and of streets themselves. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 13:03, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Although there are vexing counterexamples to that, such as the SF Peninsula's El Camino Real, which keeps the same street name for 30 miles as it runs through a dozen different cities - but the street numbers reset at each city boundary. Worse, as the whole road is a uniform medium density conurbation, it's easy to miss the modest signs denoting one has entered in to a new city, only to be perplexed that addresses have inexplicably jumped back or forward by several thousands. If they kept a uniform numbering between cities, then the addresses would get up towards the 30,000s, rather than 4,000s several times over. -- Finlay McWalterჷTalk 13:41, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * That would be why some metro areas' suburbs have conformed to the central city grid system. That works better where there actually is a grid. The situation you describe might well match the famous Peachtree Street which meanders all over Atlanta and its various suburbs. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:04, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

The answer is fairly simple. Americans like to think in terms of "blocks" - which is the stretch of a street between two consecutive cross-roads. They assign either 100, 1000 or in a few cases, 10000 numbers to each block - then number the buildings consecutively within that block. So a typical street will have 1000, 1001, 1002...1024, then a jump to either 1100 or maybe 2000 at the start of the next block. I think the idea is that city planners often lay out a grid of streets without deciding how many buildings there will be in each block. If someone wants to start erecting the very first building on (say) the 5th block - then what should it be numbered if you don't know how many buildings there will be on the 1st through 4th blocks? The idea of assigning a chunk of numbers to each block more or less solves that problem. You number your new building 5000 - and there is 'room' for up to 1000 buildings on each block. This can lead to annoyingly large house numbers - it's common to see 4 and 5 digit house numbers on streets that have less than 100 buildings.

But it can get messier than that. My house is numbered 1105 - and it's the 20th house on the first (and only!) block of the road! The house numbers start at 1000 - but jump up in a rather incomprehensible fashion along the length of the street. I suspect that they wanted to allow for the possibility of a future cross-street, so technically, we're the 5th house on the 1100 block...even though there is no cross-street where the numbers jump from 1015 and 1100.

In the UK, where this practice is not followed, you get into all sorts of problems when extra buildings are squeezed in to an existing street - you often see a letter appended to the house number so that two adjacent buildings can be 23a and 23b. The US system has the advantage of 'future-proofing'.

Another quirk happens when someone decides to extend a street. If it's extended at the high-numbered end, you just add more numbers - but if they have to extend it at the low numbered end, there is a problem - and that's why you get "East Main Street" and "West Main Street" - presumably because the former "Main Street" had to be extended off to the west at some time in the past. This gets even more silly when it's extended again, and you'll see "New Main Street" and "Business Main Street".

SteveBaker (talk) 17:43, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes the block I grew up on started numbering with 1000, although it had only 40 or so homes. The Main street off which my street branched started numbering with 100, and ran rationally numbered up to about 800. μηδείς (talk) 18:18, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The next house after that was 801+&#x221A;2. --Trovatore (talk) 18:26, 21 November 2013 (UTC)
 * My parents bought their house in the 70s at beginning of the street. At the time, lots were large and the gaps between the major cross streets were quite large (1/2 mile)  they had a three digit address, but over the years density increased, so the municipality solved the problem of having addresses in between by tacking on a 0 onto the end of house numbers on the south side and 1 on the north, thus gaining the ability to go from 100, ,101, 102 to squeezing in five houses in place of one: 1000, 1002, 1004, 1010, etc. depending on the side of the road. Mingmingla (talk) 18:21, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Address numbers may also appear uneven if the land was originally surveyed with smaller or different property lines. For example, if a stretch of road was originally surveyed with 30 foot frontages and then the developer decided to shift things around and make them 50 foot frontages, they may decide to "keep" the numbering by skipping one or more numbers between houses as needs require, so that the house numbering goes 64, 66, 72, 74, 78 and so on. It gets even messier if the opposite side of the street also has been resized. And then there's the case of the house my mother grew up in. The address was 24, which is mundane enough, but totally unlike all the numbers around. As it turned out, she was on a double lot, but the "doubling" was front-to-back because at one point it had been planned to build a side street running the length of her yard. That had never gone past the planning stages, but nevertheless the property was given that number and simply had it wedged into the set of addresses surrounding it. Matt Deres (talk) 02:05, 19 November 2013 (UTC)


 * One good reason for the East Main Street and West Main Street that SteveBaker mentions is that many US towns and cities were built around train stops. So you have a train depot/station in the center-ish of town and the town grew around it.  Since the train tracks run through the center of town and you have streets that run perpendicular to those tracks, it's logical to name the street the same thing on both sides of the tracks and differentiate one from the other by calling one East Main and the other side West Main.  That way you don't run into the trouble of starting numbers at some arbitrary point.  The point that the numbers start at is where the street crosses the train tracks.  They start at 100 on either side and go up.
 * Having East and West also makes sense because if you find yourself on East Main and know that the address that you're looking for is 500 West Main, you know exactly what direction you need to go. If the street names changed on the other side of the train tracks (or whatever center line the town uses) then there's less order.  Let's say Main turns into Elm Street on the other side of the tracks and you need to find 200 Elm Street while you're on Main.  You have no idea where Elm is even though you just need to go straight down the street you're currently on.  Dismas |(talk) 02:33, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The block system of street numbering is in use in most of the United States, but generally not in New England or eastern New York State, where most cities and towns don't have a grid, and numbering is more or less sequential without much regard for cross streets. (That is numbering is much the same as in most European countries.) Where the block system exists, it often refers to a virtual grid, such that if a street begins one mile west of the center of the grid, it is likely to begin with a street number like 1001 or 10001. Marco polo (talk) 22:56, 20 November 2013 (UTC)

Stagg 3/4 electric upright bass
It has what looks like a strap button at the back of the neck near the heel. What is this intended for? Surely. not for playing like a guitar!!--109.144.189.53 (talk) 17:03, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * It certainly looks like the kind of "snap" connector that you'd connect a strap to. I don't see why someone shouldn't play it like that.  I recall that great scene at the end of the "Master and Commander" movie where the doctor plays his cello like a guitar (IMAGE HERE) - and that instrument was a good deal more unweildy than an electric double-bass. SteveBaker (talk) 17:31, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * Ive got a stagg and tried it horizontally__ its just impossible to play that way partly because of the radiussed neck. Any other suggestions as to its use..?--109.144.189.53 (talk) 17:38, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * The strap might have just been to aid in moving it, not for while playing. This would allow people to avoid touching the more vital components, getting their skin oil on it, etc. StuRat (talk) 19:56, 18 November 2013 (UTC)


 * According to "Mateybass" at talkbass.com:
 * "For all those who've been wondering why there's a strap button on the Stagg, if you have a guitar strap, connect both ends to this button, wrap it around your body over one shoulder and underneath one armpit and shorten it. If you have the hip brace in, you can shorten the strap sufficiently to pull the brace into your body, this will then enable you to lift the whole bass up without hands and walk around whilst playing it in the upright position. A locking strap nut might be advisable though."
 * Another participant there, "horstenj", replied
 * "I tried this and it actually works quite well. I'm not so interested in walking around but it takes a decent amount of stress off my left hand as now I don't have to support the bass anymore to keep it upright.".
 * ---Sluzzelin talk  23:42, 18 November 2013 (UTC)