Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 August 18

= August 18 =

need trevia on poop and pee of different species
I am excited about gross science so these are my questions on poop and urine, feel free to answer any or all of them. as a native Blind person, all of my questions have nonvisual biases.

1. Why all human poop smells bad 2. At least for me, the early morning urine smell largely different from the urine that I excrete in different times. why? 3. When I eat things that contains fish bones, I can locate that on my poop the next day when I touch and explore it. what other interesting things that will be inside it? 4. Why some of our poop breaks down or change structure, why it's not the same everytime? 5. what I can learn from touching and smelling poop and urine? 6. In what way our excretion different from other species? 7. Do any species have similar pee and poop smell as us? 8. why the longer we hold our poop, the more uncomfortable the smel? 9. How to experience poop and pee differently? 10. anything more interesting that will awe me? What are some books that talks about poop and urine or any other gross stuff? Kaveinthran (talk) 07:43, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * There's a lot of questions here. To answer 1, see Disgust.  The disgust response in humans has a clearly useful biological purpose.  For answering other questions, many of the answers can be found at urine and feces, or by following links from those articles to further articles.  -- Jayron 32 12:13, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * That sounds like Mary Roach territory. Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal seems relevant. I'm not sure what other books there are in the niche genre of poop science. I also thought vaguely of owl pellets: animal excreta in general is scientifically useful to naturalists. Card Zero  (talk) 14:09, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * For very old poo, see coprolite. Alansplodge (talk) 11:06, 23 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Are you aware that the Australian wombat creates cubic poo? Explanation here. Personal observation of mine is that they also try to do it on top of small rocks. Haven't seen that written up anywhere though. HiLo48 (talk) 12:01, 23 August 2022 (UTC)

The Tomb at Satunsat Oshkintoka
I came across information that there was an important man's burial made in Satunsat Oshkintoka, about which Miguel Rivera Dorado wrote - where can I find more details about this? Thank you in advance. Vyacheslav84 (talk) 08:16, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * Oxkintok seems to be the more usual spelling. Alansplodge (talk) 12:40, 18 August 2022 (UTC)


 * See also and .  --Lambiam 20:55, 18 August 2022 (UTC)

Need for mobile service providers
Are mobile service providers actually essential for simple two-directional conversations through smartphones, considering that walkie-talkies, for example, don't need them? Particularly, when it comes down to simple sending and receiving wave signals, is it basically putting a price tag on the air we breath? 212.180.235.46 (talk) 19:48, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * If you are sitting next to each other on a bench, you do not need a service provider for having a conversation. In fact, you can leave your phones off. If one of you is in Paris and the other in Berlin, walkie-talkies will not do the job. The power is not enough for direct contact by radio waves; you'd need a radio transmission tower. Having an intermediary service provider comes in handy here. There is an in-between range where walkie-talkies do the job but airborne sound waves are too weak. If smartphones had been designed to do double duty as walkie talkies, you might bee able to use them in that range. It would make the smartphones more expensive and probably more bulky as well, and it would only work for a fairly limited range. --Lambiam 21:05, 18 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Also, one of the jobs of the mobile service provider is to assign an otherwise unused channel (i.e. frequency) for each side of the conversation, effectively a virtual private (well, theoretically) circuit between the two phones. When you talk into a walkie-talkie, you are broadcasting and any similar walkie-talkie within range and tuned to the same channel will receive you.  --174.95.81.219 (talk) 07:00, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * There are also walkie-talkies with encryption capabilities, such as the MBITR, preventing outsiders from listening-in. --Lambiam 07:24, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * You should be able to connect two smartphones together by wifi, with one of them acting as a hotspot. The range won't be more than a few decametres. Long-range radio links need a powerful or narrowly beamed transmitter on one end or a sensitive, narrowly beamed receiver on the other end. Cellphone basestations have the right antennas, transmitters and receivers, phones don't. Therefore, a phone-basestation link can be much longer than a phone-phone link. PiusImpavidus (talk) 09:44, 19 August 2022 (UTC)
 * TETRA mobile radio systems already allow individual phones to operate as local hotspot nodes as Piusimpavidus thinks phones should, and this is desirable for emergency services (police forces, fire departments, ambulance) that serve a large area. However cellular mobile phone networks such as GSM that handle high traffic rely on having small cells, low transmit powers and frequency reusage. To arbitrarily permit any mobile phone to operate as an independant hotspot would violate the network protocol, exceed permitted transmit power, interfere with legitimate phone users and introduce service liabilities that no mobile service operator would want. Philvoids (talk) 13:26, 20 August 2022 (UTC)


 * I don't know if they still exist, but a decade or two ago mobile companies had Push-to-talk services that were a big thing. There are now app-based options for that kind of functionality now.  -- Jayron 32 13:41, 19 August 2022 (UTC)