Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2020 January 22

= January 22 =

Insomnia and sexual frustration
Is there evidence of a connection between insomnia and sexual frustration? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 03:50, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Certainly. I'm not sure about formal studies, but it would be very easy for the questioner to test the hypothesis at home. Temerarius (talk) 04:28, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I wasn't asking for funny or would-be-clever responses. Per "We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice", you should not have responded that way (your comment resembles an attempt to provide diagnosis or advice, which you have no business doing here, and which in any case I was not asking for). I was asking a serious question, looking for a non-wiseacre response. Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:53, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You get what you pay for. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:34, 22 January 2020 (UTC)


 * This is where I would start your research. -- Jayron 32 12:59, 22 January 2020 (UTC)

Potato salad and health
Is potato salad considered a healthy food? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 06:56, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * According to Wikipedia, "potato salad is a dish made from boiled potatoes and a variety of other ingredients". Potatoes are widely considered healthy. Beyond that, you would need to identify the other ingredients. The mayo alone could be healthy or not depending on what it's made from.--Shantavira|feed me 09:21, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You mean, potatoes are widely considered to be unhealthy. Abductive  (reasoning) 10:44, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Potatoes on their own are generally a healthy food. What people add to them is always the problem. HiLo48 (talk) 10:51, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Getting a balance of nutrients from a wide variety of foods is considered healthy. Getting an excess of a single food is bad.  Depending on the preparation and amount of potatoes, as well as the specific variety of potatoes, potatoes vary in their healthiness.  It is simplistic to say "eating potatoes is bad" or "eating potatoes is good".  Potatoes can be part of a healthy, diverse diet, but could also be eaten to excess, given that they eating them to the exclusion of other foods could lead to an overabundance of some nutrients (like starches and other carbohydrates) and also to missing nutrients that you could be getting from other foods that you aren't because you're eating potatoes instead of those foods., .  To answer the OP is not possible in the simple terms.  Potato salad could contain any number of ingredients, but given that the bulk of it is potato, a reasonable amount of it as part of a balanced diet would not be the least healthy thing you could eat.  -- Jayron 32 12:57, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * This would seem to be the same kind of question as whether coffee is fattening. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:32, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Your point being? Freeknowledgecreator (talk) 02:25, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
 * That, as with the coffee question, there are too many missing facts in the question. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 03:59, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
 * You also asked the Question . I guess there a connection or something in common in these questions. First, depending on the salat dressing, potato salat can have less fat than french frises, but not guarateed. This food also contains high level on carbonhydrates, even fat and older people ehit less enegy consuption get sick by such dieds, propagated by sects and several women magazines. This is crap, looking for an victim. Eating to much carbonhydrates may disrupt your sleep, increase blood pressure and suggar levels in the short term. In the long term, see how increased blood pressure harms. Even in the Family Guy, Peter Griffins problems are known as this fictive overweight figure was put into by the editors. It is less depending on age, it is the ammount of carbonhydrate consum. See a low-carbohydrate diet or ketogenic diet as the hard core variant of it. Reducing average consum of carbon hydrates als even suggar in coffee and replacing sweet drinks by water only, does not require to consult the doctor, but may make you feel uncomfortable. Three days on ketogenic diet make the hunger go away, avoiding suggar only expands this time to five days. My first recomendation is you to count carbonhydrate kalories or total weight you eat. Before beginning a ketogenic diet, no mistake to consult the doctor, least if having problems already. Note, increase suggar and carbonhydrates were converted to suggar in the intesine, and converted to fat in the liver. Even on normal weight persons, the liver can be overfated by converted carbonhydrates, avoing high-suggar-bloodlevels. This remains unrecognized, until the liver looks like the one of an alcohol abuser also called an alcohol sick person. When comming to normal weight and a liver in normal condition, the libido will come back. This will take weeks, but should not stop or stop you from start or contiuing. High levels on not essential cholesterines are easy to normalize without medicine, stop eating, not keep drinking water for 16 hours once or twice the week. The fresh juce of one lemon may good for the kidneys least during a diet. -- Hans Haase (有问题吗) 04:40, 28 January 2020 (UTC)

How many bones are in a dolphin?
Do any of you know? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.51.140.46 (talk) 14:36, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * All of them. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:30, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Googling "number of bones in a dolphin" does not immediately yield an answer, though it would seem to be fewer than the 206 in humans, owing to a lack of real bones in the flukes. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 17:58, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * A description and a picture of a dolphin skeleton. DroneB (talk) 19:10, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * The lack of bones in the flukes is probably not important. The lack of hind limbs would decrease the total, but the presence of an actual tail (as opposed to the reduced and internalized coccyx of humans) would increase it. --Khajidha (talk) 12:36, 29 January 2020 (UTC)

UK rail electrification in passenger-kilometre terms
Hi all,

I hope this is the right reference desk, looking through the archives most related questions have been posted here...

A rather narrow question, as I'm trying to dredge up a figure and can't find it. Possibly I'm just addled from a long day of research across many rail topics lol, but I figured there may be people here with such figures closer to hand than I do.

I'm trying to establish the proportion of passenger-kilometres travelled on the GB rail network powered by electric versus diesel traction. I've seen that only 38 percent of the network is electrified, but in passenger-kilometre or even passenger-journey terms electric rail usage must be far, far higher than that, given that most electrified routes are commuter routes and major intercity routes, but I can't find an exact figure. I feel sure such a figure must exist, or at least a data source from which it can be inferred.

(PS passenger-journey rather than passenger-kilometre terms would be fine, provided the contrast was still sufficient to make the point. I also don't care if the figure is GB or UK, though I strongly suspect the GB figure is more readily obtained.)

Thanks a lot! Dan Hartas (talk) 15:50, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Be careful with this, as no-one knows and it's in massive flux. The South Wales main line is supposed to be being electrified (London to Swansea) but chunks of this have been abandoned (beyond Cardiff to Swansea), some just isn't working (Severn Tunnel has water problems), everything around Bath and Bristol was much later than planned, and because the 800 stock has been runing quite happily bi-mode as diesels, the pressure to use it electrically is perhaps less than it would have been otherwise. So in South Wales (AIUI, last time I looked) the power's on, but still not much is running on electric power as yet (short-formation HSTs on local services and 800s with the pantographs down). Andy Dingley (talk) 17:38, 22 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I somewhat doubt 'no-one knows' except perhaps in the form no one has compiled the data yet. I know that UK rail is complicated with a number of different operators. Still, I find it fairly unlikely in this modern age that each operator doesn't have a very good idea of their traction energy share on both a passenger-kilometre and passenger-journey basis. Bi-mode obviously complicates things but it's not like passengers are jumping on and off in random places, or bi-mode trains are like plug-in hybrids in the way they switch so it's hard to keep track. I mean nearly all of them were able to say how much diesel and how much electricity they used [//dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/infrastructure-and-emissions/rail-emissions/] and while that just requires raw input which they're paying for; keeping track of how many kilometres your trains are traveling, how many passengers are on them, and what power they were using seems to be the kind of data a company will keep track of not least because it affects maintenance etc. And there is a fair amount of data [//dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rail-usage/] [//www.gov.uk/government/collections/rail-statistics] on the different operators, lines, ticket types etc, unfortunately not this that I could find. Someone was able to come up with figures for 2006-2007 based on data provided by ATOC (I think) [//doi.org/10.2148/benv.35.1.70] (Jstor [//www.jstor.org/stable/23289645], preprint [//ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:cd7d3eb7-e57c-427d-9ec6-70da72389cce/datastreams/ATTACHMENT03]) which showed 17.9 billion passenger-km for diesel and 28.93 billion passenger-km for electric. And our article Railway electrification in Great Britain has an even older figure of 60% of journeys being by electric traction. (Eurostat has "Train-movements, by type of vehicle and source of power" [//ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/transport/data/database], unfortunately no data for the UK.) Nil Einne (talk) 09:44, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
 * I found [//assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/829336/2019_Green-house-gas-reporting-methodology.pdf] which seems to confirm there's probably no official figure since 2006-2007 "The emission factors were calculated based on the relative passenger km proportions of diesel and electric rail provided by DfT for 2006-2007 (since no newer datasets are available from DfT)". Also I maybe should mention the International Energy Agency has estimates unfortunately only for Europe as a region. [//www.iea.org/reports/the-future-of-rail] / [//www.carbonbrief.org/eight-charts-show-how-aggressive-railway-expansion-could-cut-emissions] Nil Einne (talk) 09:59, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
 * Thanks for this! The 2007 figures give a proportion of 61.8% electric then, which I suppose is a lower bound, as there has been some electrification work done since then. Between this, which I found this morning, and Andy Dingley's comment, I guess I can establish 75% as an upper bound as well, which is close enough that I can probably make it work. It does seem the sort of thing that there ought to be a figure for, and I have found a few sources that talk like they know this but don't give it. It seems one of those annoying medium-depth pieces of information that is too specific for beginner summaries and too obvious to be included in sources that assume expertise. Obviously if anyone can find it, that would still be welcome, but for now, thanks all! Dizzy Beacon (talk) 10:06, 23 January 2020 (UTC)
 * "No-one knows" means two things here: nothing is published (the rail industry just can't get its act together to commnicate some of this stuff) and secondly really no-one does know what will be happening in a month. Even the operators do not know what power source they'll be using in a month's time on some lines, because work on them is continually being delayed unpredictably.
 * The main problem isn't the number of operators (they have relatively little overlap), it's the split between Network Rail who have the fixed infrastructure and the group of operators (rollng stock and operation of trains). It doesn't matter what an operator wants to do, and what their trains are capable of, if NR don't have the power turned on over a stretch of it.
 * We also have some operators who have performed so poorly recently that they're likely to have their franchises either not renewed or even terminated in mid contract. We had this in the past where one was effectively nationalised (and then ran very well). But with today's government as a single-party state aspiring to become a full-blown kleptocracy, those franchises will just be handed out again to some other friends from school, who will be no better. Sadly we've even had European operators operating in the UK and although they did a good job to start with, they've mostly been dragged down to the awful standard of the other operators (inadequate stock, unreliable service and price gouging) because a market where such things are standard will tend to force all operators within it to meet the same low standards.
 * UK rail is a mess, but then it's no worse than we deserve having voted for it to be so bad. Andy Dingley (talk) 12:15, 23 January 2020 (UTC)