Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 May 29

= May 29 =

Healing exposed bones
So I've been looking at images of people who have abused a particularly nasty narcotic called Krokodil. It appears that the unfortunate result of this is severe necrosis of tissue. In fact, so severe are the injuries users end up with complete tissue destruction right down to the bone.

This got me thinking. How do medics rehabilitate injuries that go right down to the bone. Clearly, there's no tissue left to heal. Just a bone. There's one picture of a guy with his jaw bone sticking out. Is there some way to encourage skin to grow over the bone, or what. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.89.180.91 (talk) 11:43, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * One technique sometimes used in plastic surgery is to place a balloon under good adjacent skin, then slowly inflate it, over the course of many days. The skin then grows as the balloon expends.  Then, the balloon is removed and the patient has excess skin which can be used to cover the gap.  However, they would need to keep the underlying tissue and bone healthy during those days.  There's an artificial skin that might be useful temporarily.  But if there's no skin or tissue, and only damaged bone, they may need to do an amputation. StuRat (talk) 18:22, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * There's flap surgery and it can be combined with the technique StuRat mentioned. But I think it would be awfully hard to do in the case where the haw bone is bared. Sjö (talk) 18:31, 29 May 2016 (UTC)

Babies skulls
How soft is a babys skull, if you squeeze it would leave an indentation (like a foam cushion) and then just expand out to it's original shape. Any general ideas on this? Sadly I don't have a baby of my own at present in order to find this out. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.252.54.42 (talk) 13:53, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Read Fontanelle. I'm sure it was a joke, but for those with no sense of humour, don't try the above at home. Alansplodge (talk) 15:04, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Note that the baby's skull is often somewhat squeezed and deformed during vaginal birth, but does "bounce back" into the proper shape in short order. StuRat (talk) 18:57, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, newborn skulls are soft and flexible and deform to fit through the birth canal. I'm not sure they're soft enough to leave an indentation when pressed, however. clpo13(talk) 19:04, 29 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Among the list of bodily modifications that have probably died out entirely (like footbinding), we find Artificial cranial deformation, which was practised in many cultures over millenia. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 16:53, 30 May 2016 (UTC)


 * I know that the practice of massaging the head to make it smooth and round (i.e., to remove deformities) was a common practice among African American mothers and grandmothers in the past, and that insults based on 'malformed' head shapes still occur in the black community. I can't find a reference after 15 minutes of looking, and am not sure what is said http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9443706 here, but they do mention blacks. μηδείς (talk) 22:17, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Which is this Mountain?
Could anyone tell me which is this mountain?-- Jos   eph   13:56, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * User:991joseph, your link only produces the message "404. That’s an error. The requested URL was not found on this server" (on my computer at any rate). Alansplodge (talk) 15:02, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * AlansplodgeFixed it. Please check the link now.-- Jos   eph   15:18, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * It wants a Google login. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:10, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Still can't see it. Try uploading it to Wikimedia Commons. Alansplodge (talk) 16:40, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm getting a 404 as well. Dismas |(talk) 00:49, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Windows Vista users with Internet Explorer 9 are excluded by Google from opening the link. AllBestFaith (talk) 17:04, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I tried Firefox and it still wants a Google login. Since the OP hasn't bothered to address any of these issues, I can only assume he's not very interested in finding out the answer. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:14, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I am not crippled by using either Windows or IE. Dismas |(talk) 17:39, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe you could upload it to Wikipedia, at least long enough for the rest of us to see it. Or, locate it in the wide-open Google Images, if it's there. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:41, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I think no one besides the OP has seen the photo. I have no idea why AllBestFaith bought up IE9 or Windows, I'm pretty sure Dismas's point is that the problems have nothing to do with browser or OS. If the image can be found with a Google Images search then it probably shouldn't be uploaded to wikipedia. However there's a fair chance it can't be since it sounds like the image may be in the OP's personal collection although the fact they don't know what mountain it is makes me wonder if they are the copyright holder. Nil Einne (talk) 04:54, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Did you try the link? Are you able to see it? And if it is on Google Images, it need not be uploaded - the URL could be posted here. And if the OP is pulling some kind of copyright shenanigan, that could explain his reluctance to provide further info. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 05:33, 31 May 2016 (UTC)

Looking for a corpus of Emoji communications.
(It was hard to choose whether to ask this in Computing or Language ref desks...so I settled for here!)

I'm trying to do some informal research on communication using Emoji - and I need a reasonably large corpus of communications that I could download and do some simple statistics on.

Does anyone have any idea where I could find such a thing? Is there perhaps someplace where I could scrape a bunch of these communications from a social media site to work on?

TIA. SteveBaker (talk) 15:16, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Maybe Wikipedia talkpages? I mean, you can download a wikipedia dump, or you can look at the amount of times the smiley template has been transcluded (but that doesn't include text-based smilies). The Quixotic Potato (talk) 17:19, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * The problem is that the conclusions you draw can only be valid for that specific source of data. I think that smileys are far more common in text messages, social media and chat programs than they are in other forms of communication. The Quixotic Potato (talk) 17:44, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I think you're talking about Emoticons...which are a tiny subset of Emoji. Emoji is slowly becoming an entire language of it's own...emoticons are just a bunch sideways faces. SteveBaker (talk) 03:28, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * I would recommend Googling "statistics on emoji use", I got results like and . The Quixotic Potato (talk) 22:00, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Yeah - I saw those. Nothing in any obvious googling found what I want. SteveBaker (talk) 03:28, 30 May 2016 (UTC)


 * I don't think you'll find any established research corpora (yet?). I think you'll have to scrape your own to start. I think Twitter might be a good place to start. They support many, but not all emoji . They have lots and lots of public feeds and from what I've heard the API is fairly powerful and well documented . So I imagine a guy like you could harvest a few tens of thousands of tweets containing emoji by the end of the day :) It will take much longer of course to work out what kind of sampling methodology to use if you really want rigorous, publishable results but for a pet project I wouldn't worry too much as long as you can get a decent chunk of public-facing tweets with emoji. Actually an added benefit is you can see things like what emoji are responses to other emoji, and I don't think anything else public will get you that level of machine-readable interaction. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:32, 30 May 2016 (UTC)


 * This research paper mentions briefly how they gathered their twitter-based emoji corpus. In many fields it would be common courtesy to publish this data set for easy public download, or at least to provide it upon polite request. That might be useful if you wanted to compare your analysis to theirs, but using the same corpus might not offer any additional advantages for your use. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:38, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

Nib Pen comes with reservoir or not?
I recently received a calligraphy set that, along with cartiage caligraphy fountain pens, it also contain one dip pen, with a nib similar to. I am not sure if it's suppose to have no reservoir. Been searching on google and so far it only mentioned the major brands (speedball, etc), all of which comes with a clip on reservoir. The Dip pen page stated: "However, there are simple, tiny tubular reservoirs that illustrators sometimes clip onto dip pens; these allow drawing for several minutes without recharging the nib.". So my question is: did I lost its reservoir, or is it suppose to just come with the nib and the penholder? The package content list just says "1 classic dip pen" George Leung (talk) 23:51, 29 May 2016 (UTC)
 * If it's like the one in the picture, I'd say it is not meant to have a reservoir. --TammyMoet (talk) 10:48, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * If the instructions with the calligraphy set tell you how to refill the dip pen reservoir, then you have lost it. If they don't, you haven't. 86.191.126.192 (talk) 16:10, 30 May 2016 (UTC)

It's closer to TBH. the only instruction is on how to write, how to take care of the nib (by washing), and how to refill the fountain pens. Right now I am using sumi ink, and the ink on nib only last a few characters/4 words before needing recharge; not sure if it's the pen or ink or method.George Leung (talk) 16:39, 30 May 2016 (UTC)


 * Back in the 1960s at my London primary school, we were expected to write with dip pens without reservoirs from the age of about nine. The trick is to dip the nib in about halfway and then wipe most of ink off on the edge of the inkwell. With practice, you could manage two or three shortish words before needing to dip again. New nibs were often slightly greasy and therefore ink repellent, so sucking a new nib before dipping helped the process (you can also try it after the first dip, but you get a blue tongue). I was promoted to the exalted position of "ink monitor", whose job was to fill the tiny ceramic inkwells which sat in an aperture at the top of each desk, using an enormous gallon can of ink with a screw-on spout. My mother was less pleased with my promotion, since removing school ink from white shirts was well-nigh impossible. PS: don't be tempted to play darts with your dip pen, as the tip of the nib is irreparably damaged after the first few throws; this had unpleasant results when corporal punishment was still legal. Alansplodge (talk) 19:16, 30 May 2016 (UTC)
 * Oh Alansplodge our shared history and skills that are dying out... --TammyMoet (talk) 10:03, 31 May 2016 (UTC)
 * No, not dying out, Tammy. I've taken to writing some things with a fountain pen, and when I made it known that it was very difficult to find them these days, I was given a large box of artists' materials by a friend who had no more use for them, and it included all manner of nib pens and special inks and other stuff I'd never heard of, which I'm slowly getting acquainted with. I've since discovered disposable fountain pens as well, which are lovely (except the ones I can get only come in blue and black, but I want red and green too). --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  20:56, 2 June 2016 (UTC)