Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2014 June 3

= June 3 =

Skyline one season one team one city
I am looking for different facts in the book called Skyline one season one team one city by Tim Keown. I cant seem to find any. Can you help me out please? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.139.165.60 (talk) 01:49, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * What facts are you looking for ? Here are some reviews and other info: . StuRat (talk) 03:49, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

Cost of charging a mobile/cell phone (or similar)
I was wondering, on average or a 'ballpark' figure, how much does it take, in kilowatt hours of electricity or $ equivalent, to charge a mobile/cell phone or similar device, like an android tablet? I thought that it would be fairly insignificant next to the cost of operating an incandescent light bulb, for example. This English newspaper source (Daily Mail) says
 * "... hourly cost of charging an iPhone 3G is negligible at 0.0002 pence - the equivalent to £1.90 a year if the mobile is on charge constantly and the screen turned off."

Does that seem about right? -220  of  Borg 09:44, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * The power consumption of a typical phone (averaged over 'normal' usage) is around half a watt...so yeah, if you ran it off a wall socket - it would be consuming much less than an incandescent lightbulb - actually rather less than a super-efficient LED bulb. But the consumption rate is hugely dependent on what the phone is doing.  The more the phone is doing, the more it consumes.  But if it's sleeping - then it should be a little below half a watt.


 * The average price of electricity in the USA is 12 cents per kilowatt-hour - in the UK, it's 15p per kw-h. So at half a watt for 24 hours, you're talking about 12 watt-hours, which is 0.012 kilowatt-hours - so 12*0.012=0.144 cents to run your phone for a day in the USA...about 53 cents per year.  UK electricity costs are higher - so 15*0.012=0.18p per day which is 66p per year.   But that's the cost of the raw electricity...when you're charging the battery and running the phone off of that - it's is less efficient than just running the device from the wall socket because the battery gets warm and wastes energy.  Batteries are considerably less than 100% efficient...so £1.90 a year seems entirely plausible.   It's certainly in the right ballpark. SteveBaker (talk) 13:23, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Please consider saying "...running the phone off that - it's less efficient..." 84.209.89.214 (talk) 15:41, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Please consider not pointing out our grammar/spelling errors every chance you get. It really isn't helpful. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:47, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Please consider the possibility that "every chance you get" is an exaggeration that isn't helpful. Honest errors don't worry me, they can actually reassure us that people want to do better. Deliberate defiance of basic rules of English and pretending that using exactly the same distorted grammar for years is accidental would be the behaviour of a disingenuous person. The alternative to helping that person to edit properly might be to try to ban English teachers and burn books on the notion that someone sensitive might be spared humiliation. 84.209.89.214 (talk) 23:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Please consider that as a block evader, you shouldn't be drawing attention to you'reself (sic) . You particularly shouldn't be repeating the sort of stuff that got you blocked in the first place. Please also consider that some people have started to take more care with such grammar/spelling issues, no thanks to you. However annoying block evaders who can't give stuff a rest may make some of us think its (sic) not worth it. Its (sic) all very well spending time on such stuff if there's actually a good reason, but you've definitely repeatedly established pleasing people such as you'reself (sic) isn't one. There are a few people like JackOfOz who's opinions are worth something, but ultimately its (sic) our time and our choice, and your (sic) heavily pushing it in to the 'don't bother' column. (Not to make a point like with this post, but because we may not consider such issues that important and it does add a small amount of time to each reply. So the cost-benefit is easily skewed if one of the costs is pleasing people such as you'reself.) In other words, its (sic) up you whether you want to approach stuff in such a way that you may encourage compliance. If its (sic) you're (sic) choice to do so in a way which will discourage it, well its (sic) you're (sic) funeral. Just like its (sic) my decision whether to take my cat for it's (sic) walk today, although hopefully not my funeral whichever option I choose. Nil Einne (talk) 05:23, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Do you actually walk your cat or is that a figure of speech? I am unfamiliar with such a phrase 190.78.149.202 (talk) 22:55, 12 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Please consider the feelings of dog owners who cannot partake in the accumulating good karma evident in your relationship with your cat, who must have previously existed as an enlightened being to have reached the fortunate state it now enjoys of being in your care. The editorial interpolation [sic] is short for Latin sic erat scriptum "thus it was written". It enables a commentator to cite correctly what another has written that contains an error without himself compounding the error by appearing to endorse it by repetition. A more elaborate form of the interpolation, not seen today as often as when it was common, is to append recte and the corrected error. To illustrate the method, I quote your first example which reads: "you shouldn't be drawing attention to you'reself [sic] [rect yourself]." That is too verbose; applying [sic] repeatedly (13 times!) to what one self writes is hard to appreciate outside a scizoid scenario and the best thing to do with language errors is not to make them in the first place. 84.209.89.214 (talk) 12:02, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

Should an involved editor use a hat to affect a discussion in which they also take part? 84.209.89.214 (talk) 20:55, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Soytenly. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:50, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Indoobitebly. ;-) --220  of  Borg 07:24, 5 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Thank you for the reply and calculations Steve, though I am in Australia, and my power is a bit more expensive, and also has a flat fee just to be connected to the grid, which bumps up the average cost. IIRC for me to about A$25c kw/h. The 'grammatical error' is the sort of thing foisted on me by so called 'autocorrect' on my android tablet. I wonder if Steve is using one? It is dissapointing to see unnecessary agro on such a minor thing though. :-( (Written before Nil Einnes' cmt re sockpuppetry)  now 'hatted'.
 * The 2011 article I linked to was about UK Sussex Police banning staff from charging their phones at work to save money! ≈5,000 staff x ≈£4≈£20,000 per year if they kept them on charge 24x7! Rather trifling as the real cost would likely be a small fraction of that. My POV ≤ £5,000 a year.
 * Has anyone come cross this type of 'pettyness' themselves?
 * The police officers were also 'expected' to have their phones for official use, or ended up using them as their radio system was poor. I wonder if the ban is still in force? --220  of  Borg 06:07, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Yeah - that's kinda ridiculous. I certainly have come across that kind of craziness before.  An example of this was that the company I used to work for had vending machines for cans of soda in the break room.  They were originally subsidized and sold for 25 cents.  The company looked at how much this was costing saw that it was costing them money and decided to bump the price up to 35 cents.   We software engineers were quite well paid at the time (>$100,000 per year for an 8 hour day, 200 days per year) - and it works out that they were paying us $1 per minute.  So if upping the price by 10 cents added more than 6 seconds to the time it took to get a soda - they were onto a losing deal.   Dunno about you - but I sure as hell can't find the right coins and stuff them into the machine that fast!  It was actually a lot worse than that - people got upset about the price hike and walked across the street to the local 7-11 store to buy soda there...initially, this was just a protest, but people realized that they liked having ice, and a nice large cup and a wider range of flavors, and the 7-11 didn't run out of Diet Coke every week!   The cult of "Hey Joe - you wanna pop across the street and grab a soda with me?" kicked in and people would waste 20 minutes doing that.  Worse still is that employing more people to cover for the loss of all those odd minutes means that you need more computers, more office space, more IT and HR departments.   The ACTUAL cost of having someone work there was between 5 and 10 times what they were actually paid...so making the sodas completely free would have been a VASTLY better thing to do.   Add to that the morale benefits of taking that step - and the fact that being nice to your employees encourages higher quality people to want to work there...and it's a complete no-brainer!


 * These days, I work in the slightly more sane computer games industry where soda, snacks, breakfast cereal, bagels, donuts and even basic microwavable lunch meals are traditionally freebies...that's not just a nice thing to do for your employees - it actually saves the company money. If you can get just one employee to stay at his desk and work through lunch with a microwaved ramen noodle pack - then you saved $60 in salary alone - which is more than enough to pay for free food and soda for a week!  Hardly anyone goes out for lunch every day - and when people do eat in the break room, they usually "talk shop" - so the communications improvement is worthwhile.


 * In the case you mention, it's interesting to note that they didn't ban people from bringing (and, presumably using) private cellphones at work. So...what happens to your local policeman when his personal phone goes dead and he's needs to call his kid's teacher at school or make a doctor's appointment?  Maybe he uses the office phone to make a private call?  Maybe he stops at a phone box?  Any of those activities will cost FAR more than letting him charge up his phone at work. SteveBaker (talk) 18:08, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * US$100,000! :-o Yes, penny pincher bureaucrats do often get it wrong. As pointed out in the article, it probably cost a lot more in studies to come to that decision, than it will save in many years. (That Brit penny pincher probably has nice job now at the World Bank, or maybe Greece!) Tempted to e-mail Sussex coppers to see if at work charging ban is still in force.
 * Are you using a tablet which 'corrects' your grammar or speeling as I hypothesised? --220  of  Borg 07:24, 5 June 2014 (UTC)
 * It's worth remembering Daily Mail is a tabloid known for the frequent wildly misleading sensationalist frothing at the mouth stories. A few quick search confirms that while many other sources aren't that much better, they are a bit. For example both the BBC and the Telegraph  mention two key points.
 * One is that the ban is on all non essential personal electrical equipment. This is where all sources fail somewhat. Most sources seem to concentrate on mobile phones and/or MP3 players. However the ban would seem to include stuff like personal laptops, kettles, coffee makers and whatever else. I don't know how common these are for safety, security and other such reasons but since the ban seems to cover all staff including civilian ones, I imagine it may apply in some cases. Theoretically the ban could be written to cover high energy usage stuff but not lower ones, but I don't think it's that surprising it covered them all.
 * The second point (which I've noticed even the Daily Mail article does mention) is the ban is also intended to cover the cost of portable appliance testing or inspection. I suspect this is the far bigger concern. Probably also why it made good sense to cover all devices, the energy usage even when counting higher energy usage devices particularly considering their likely low number, is probably dwarfed by the testing or inspection cost. And if everyone on average is bringing in 2 devices, and changing them every other year this easily adds up. Remembering of course in 2011 the microUSB charging revolution was still in a relatively early stage. And in any case, I suspects there's still a lot of people who change their charger with every device regardless of whether it's needed. Not helped probably by the adhoc and unstandardised way high power charging developed.
 * Theoretically of course they could have operated PAT on a completely cost recovery basis but there may be reasons why that was unfeasible.
 * For starters, it's probably easier to implement a ban on all rather than try to monitor compliance with proper PAT, even among the police. (And actually, I wonder if the story behind the ban was more complicated than what's public. It's easy to imagine some stickler at health and safety decided people bringing random chargers was problematic since many of them weren't being tested. Those managers responsible for dealing with this sort of stuff realised that trying to deal with this would cost way too much so it would be easier to just ban them all. But HSE derived bans are never popular with anyone. Cost cutting was the buzz-word at the time, and they thought they could sell it as that. It unsurpisingly failed, but I don't think it's surpising they would try something like that. Alternatively, they may have been hoping the ban would discourage usage of such devices which they wanted to do, but felt saying the cost in testing and energy would come off a lot better than saying the police were wasting time with their personal devices.)
 * Calculating the cost of PAT is also probably not so simple. I don't know if these are normally sent offsite or done in house somewhere for the police force in question, but you'd need to include the added movement or transport cost. Unless you can be totally sure only the person submitting the item does this and only on their break which I suspect is unlikely. Remembering that with user submitted stuff, it must be coming in every so often at odd times, so you probably can't rely on a normal walkabout or the devices all being sent to the testing centre before being sent out or whatever. And the bug bear of all low value cost recovery attempts, the cost of accounting for this and charging whoever is responsible will probably outweigh the testing/inspection cost itself.)
 * In case there's confusion, my point is that the small cost to charging phones may not have been a significant factor in the decision. I do agree that when government entities in particular are asked to save money, you do often get ridiculious cost cutting measures which make little sense. And I'm not saying I agree the ban makes sense, I think there are plenty of reasons such as those highlighted by SteveBaker and 220 and others which means it doesn't.
 * Plus there is fair debate over whether PAT is needed for such cases    but of course convincing someone in health and safety of that is a different matter. The PAT incidentally will probably be a visual inspection for most items we're talking about unless whoever in charge is ultra fussy (but as I mentioned the major cost will probably come from having to get the device to someone to be inspected).
 * An interesting point is that according to, it's actually quite common for various police forces in the UK to be asked to charge various work related devices like radios at home, primarily for reasons other than the charging or testing cost, such as the requirement the device be ready for work use.
 * Another interest point, the police force behind the electrical device controversy suggest it's (its for the benefit of CA3) beneficial for individuals to apply for a tax deductable professional expense for the £2.00 they pay per year charging their radios . (I can't help wondering if this figure came from however worked out the cost of personal electrical device at work for them.)
 * Also, it seems Ryanair introduced a ban in 2005, possibly only on mobile phones. Although suggests it was more about such activity being unsuitable to carry out during work rather than any specific cost. (And RyanAir is known for their controversial policies.)
 * On the other hand, I can't find any evidence such bans are common (despite some suggestion in the forum thread), beyond those arising from existing bans (such as a lack of PAT for personal devices or a ban on all personal phones at work). If such bans were common, the police ban would be less surprising since a classic government cost cutting exercise is to try ensure your policies are similar in the corporate world so you at least appear like you're doing well. (Regardless of whether the policy makes much sense for anyone let alone your specific case.)
 * Nil Einne (talk) 19:35, 5 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Do you actually expect people to read that, Nil? Its length is very off-putting and daunting, so you just waste your own time.  I don't believe it couldn't have been expressed using far fewer words - and I haven't even read it.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  12:49, 6 June 2014 (UTC)

Lawn maintenance
How did people maintain lawns before there were lawn mowers? —Wavelength (talk) 21:18, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * With a scythe, as noted in the history section of Lawn mower. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 21:21, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Also note that before power lawn mowers there there were the manual push mowers. I tried using one of those, and it's rather unpleasant. StuRat (talk) 21:52, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
 * , FYI those manual push mowers are called reel mowers. And yes, they are unpleasant.  Dismas |(talk) 23:33, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Check out Lawn.
 * For the most part people didn't maintain lawns, unless they were quite rich. They either had gardens (with no grass), or grassy fields that could be allowed to overgrow, or used to grazing feed animals. APL (talk) 23:07, 3 June 2014 (UTC)


 * [[Image:Sheeponthesouthlawn.jpg|thumb|right|200px]] Even the White House had sheep on the South Lawn at one time.  → Michael J Ⓣ Ⓒ Ⓜ 06:59, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Regardless of how rare it was, one may legitimately ask how the servants of Filthylucre Manor kept the lawn tidy in the old days. —Tamfang (talk) 19:13, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Push mowers aren't all that difficult to use, provided they are in good working order (well oiled and very sharp), the grass is trimmed regularly and the grass isn't wet. With those conditions, there is very little resistance at all. Less, I recall, than pushing an empty wheel barrow.DOR (HK) (talk) 07:40, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Agreeing with APL and DOR: Lawns as we know them in the USA weren't very common until the postwar era. Keeping up with the Joneses, and conspicuous consumption had something to do with it, as well as cheaper access to internal combustion engines from the military industrial complex. The original idea in Europe is that one must be rich, if he could afford to spend time and money on land for pleasure, rather than use that land to make money, e.g. through agriculture. Push reel mowers can indeed be a pleasure to operate, they are much lower maintenance, quieter, and less polluting than "conventional" gas mowers. I encourage anyone interested to check out the latest models by Fiskars. (For fear of running afoul of WP:SOAP, I will not give my thoughts on the incredible amounts of time and energy wasted in the name of "lawncare" in the USA. And that's not even considering the pollution, loss of biodiversity, and other ecological problems... but if anyone is interested in the science and reasoning of why lawns-as-we-know-them are bad, feel free to drop a line at my talk page :) SemanticMantis (talk) 16:48, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Aside from using a scythe - a lot of people kept goats or sheep on their property - and those would keep the grass down to a manageable level. SteveBaker (talk) 18:12, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * I now remember Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 April 6.
 * —Wavelength (talk) 18:55, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Very rich people didn't want to be walking in animal droppings though, so they had a Ha-ha to keep the herbivores at a distance. The grass closer to the house was cut by manual labour. "The secret of a good close cut was "little and often", preferably once a week. Scything in the morning, while the ground was still damp, was recommended, but it was important to "pole" the lawn first (swishing a long whippy stick across the grass to remove wormcasts) and to roll the ground to firm it and set the blades of grass in a uniform direction. Lawn edges were best trimmed with sheepshearing clippers". On this side of the Atlantic, manual lawn mowers are called cylinder mowers or colloquially "push mowers" and still have an enthusiastic following of perfectionists with modest-sized lawns. Alansplodge (talk) 19:05, 4 June 2014 (UTC)


 * Are you (or is one) supposed to maintain that green stuff in the yard? Guess I must be trailer trash or somthin.--Aspro (talk) 21:44, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
 * Or a hayseed. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 22:06, 4 June 2014 (UTC)