Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 February 12

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February 12

Part of a watch

What is the projection on each side of the watch's case called, to which the watch strap or bracelet is attached? Thanks in advance... 223.177.207.30 (talk) 04:56, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Looks as if it is called a lug. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 05:33, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

And of course from the disambiguation Lug comes "Lug, the protrusion from the case of a wristwatch to which the strap or bracelet attaches, usually by means of spring pins that bridge pairs of lugs at the upper and lower sides of a watch's case." CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 05:34, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I have a very clear memory that when I used to have to go to a jeweller or watchmaker (in the UK) to get a new strap fitted, they called the spring-pins lugs, not the projections on the watch. It's years since I have had to do this, but my memory's pretty clear. I can't find any evidence of this use - does anybody else recognise it? --ColinFine (talk) 22:11, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Not sure if this helps, but I found this: "A lug is defined as: extensions on the top and bottom of a watch where the bracelet or strap is attached". Has an illustration in this PDF. ^Avic_ennasis @ 20:14, 9 Adar I 5771 / 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Category:New Jersey articles missing geocoordinate data

Well, we've been working hard to locate all the geo coordinates for all the New Jersey articles and are down to a last few. See Category:New Jersey articles missing geocoordinate data. Basically, it has come down to two plank roads and Stilwells or Stillwells, New Jersey. Any assistance in helping us complete this long task would be most welcome. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 05:56, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Firearm help

I received some items from a family member's estate. One of them is a firearm, with "Harrison & Richardson, Model 088" engraved on it. I have very little knowledge of firearms - can someone tell what kind of ammunition would it take? And if I decided to sell it, is there like a "blue book" or similar to let me know a fair price for it? Thanks, 72.77.95.134 (talk) 05:58, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Would that be Harrington & Richardson, Model 1888? -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 06:02, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Does it look like this [1]?

Yes, it looks like the one in the link. And it clearly says "Model 088", not 1888. 72.77.95.134 (talk) 06:14, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I assume you scrolled down and read the description at the bottom of that page? Heiro 06:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Yep. So, 12 Gauge? Got it, thanks! 72.77.95.134 (talk) 07:45, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

It may be marked on the barrel. Twelve gauge comes in at least two chamber lengths so you need more information before you know which shell you will need. A gunsmith might be able to answer both your questions. Rmhermen (talk) 17:45, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

If it was made in 1888 I would get it reproofed before firing again anyway. It would have been designed for Black Powder -not modern propellants, so the original proof is void. Also, you don't know what other owners may have done to it which might have introduced weaknesses and thus voiding any subsequent re-proofs.--Aspro (talk) 18:17, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

In other words a gun made to fire black powder is likely to explode when modern smokeless powder is fired in it. Edison (talk) 20:21, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Model 088 has nothing to do with 1888. See here H & R Firearms#Shotguns for the Topper model Shotgun. Heiro 00:25, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Is Brawn GP the shortest-lived championship winning team in F1 history?

OK so 2011 may not be the best year to ask this question, but with the pain of Brawn GP's departure after only season in F1 still going in my heart (I was a big fan of Brawn in 2009) and with Mercedes GP as well as Michael Schumacher having a disappointing season, I decided to ask this question. Brawn GP only existed for 17 races and one season in F1, but with 8 wins, 15 podiums, 5 pole positions and 4 fastest laps, as well as both the driver's and constructor's championships, it may also be considered one of the best, being the first (and so far, only) team to have a 100% championship success rate. Since then, I have been wondering has there even been any other championship winning team which also lasted for only one season, or competed in less races (less than 17 races). Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 07:42, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

List_of_Formula_One_records#Constructor_records has some of the information you require. I see there that there are 7 other teams who have only won one championship, but only one (Vanwall) has a percentage approaching Brawn's. So you could be right that it's the shortest-lived championship winning team. --TammyMoet (talk) 10:07, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Six Nations discipline

I'd like to know of the last few instances of sendings-off (red cards) in the Six Nations Championship. It seems a rare occurrence so I am interested in what situations call for it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.70.249.207 (talk) 17:30, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

This is a question where a rugby referee might help.There is a "Contact Us" link at the bottom of the RBS 6 website that might give an answer to your question. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 01:19, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

• The first was John Davies, in 1995 at Cardiff. You can see a picture of him getting the red card here. DuncanHill (talk) 01:30, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

And the use of the red card comes under Law 10 Foul Play of the Laws of Rugby. DuncanHill (talk) 01:48, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

It's rare: there was Scott Murray in Wales v Scotland, 2006, for kicking a player who tackled him.[2] — Preceding unsigned comment added by Colapeninsula (talk • contribs) 10:31, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Flan versus Custard

Can you please explain the difference between custard and flan? The definitions are not helpful in Wikipedia nor in other dictionaries. Thank You. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.208.237.78 (talk) 22:54, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

As far as I know, flan is a specific type of custard that comes from Spain. Or possibly, flan is just the Spanish word for "custard" (the test would be, what would Spanish people call other sorts of custard?). But in that case, I think it would still be the case that in English the word flan refers specifically to the Spanish style. --Trovatore (talk) 22:56, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

What a bizarre question! A flan is a flat open tart, and custard is either a baked mixture of milk, eggs etc or a sweet sauce made of milk thickened with cornflour. DuncanHill (talk) 22:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

(Translation for Americans: Duncan presumably means cornstarch).

I am unfamiliar with the "flat open tart" meaning. Everything that I've ever eaten that was called flan was basically a warm crème caramel, too eggy for my taste. I had never heard of the eggless custard either; that sounds tasty though. --Trovatore (talk) 23:16, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I believe Americans call cornflour cornstarch (we use starch on our collars, not in our food). Bird's Custard is good stuff. DuncanHill (talk) 00:02, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Our way makes more sense. Cornstarch isn't flour, because it isn't made by grinding grain, but by washing away the starch from the ground grain and collecting it. Cornflour is what you bake into cornbread (yum), just like you bake wheat flour into wheat bread, and white flour you throw out in the trash because it isn't really good for anything. --Trovatore (talk) 00:06, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

We don't eat cornbread (I'm glad to say). DuncanHill (talk) 00:13, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

More for us! --Trovatore (talk) 00:15, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Math(s): Pi R square. No, pie are round. Cornbread are square. Edison (talk) 06:02, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Not a bizarre question at all. "Flan" has two food related meanings. One is a quiche like dish (either savory or sweet) with a pastry crust and egg based filling. The other meaning is synonymous with Crème caramel which is a type of custard. --Daniel 23:00, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Do you have a citation for the second meaning of flan which you give? DuncanHill (talk) 23:02, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Seriously? Google "flan." --Daniel 23:06, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Duncan: Where I live, we eat 'custard pie,' which is a flat open tart filled with a baked mixture of milk, eggs etc... it looks pretty much exactly like a flan. Except I think flan is caramelized on top, isn't it? I'd have said, based on what I get when I order them in restaurants, that 'flan' is Spanish for 'custard.' -FisherQueen (talk · contribs) 23:09, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I did check Chambers for flan, that's where the "flat open tart" definition comes from. Flans can be sweet or savoury. A quiche is a kind of savoury flan with a poncy foreign name. A custard tart is a tart filled with custard (the baked sort). You can pour custard over a flan. DuncanHill (talk) 23:18, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

In North and South America as well as the rest of the Spanish speaking world flan = Crème caramel a type of custard. You can look at numerous flan recipes online describing a creme caramel equivalent. --Daniel 23:23, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Also interestingly enough flan is a "poncy" foreign name as well deriving from the French according to the OED. --Daniel 23:25, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Foreign to the Spanish, you mean? --Trovatore (talk) 23:28, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

I was referring to Duncan calling quiche a poncy foreign name for flan, when in actuality they are both originally French words. --Daniel 23:30, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

"Flan" derives from the French, "quiche" is French. Anyway, here's a picture of a tasty looking flan. DuncanHill (talk) 23:31, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

That does look good. But it's not a flan, as the word is used in the States. If you called it that people would look at you funny. --Trovatore (talk) 23:52, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I don't see the distinction you're making between the words flan and quiche. They're both naturalized loanwords, perfectly fine words in English. It's new to me though that flan derives from French; I thought it was Spanish. Probably it was a French loanword in Spanish first, and came into English from the Spanish. --Trovatore (talk) 23:54, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Flan, for a flat sort of tart, came into English from French. I have no idea how it came into American. Quiche actually comes from German via French. DuncanHill (talk) 23:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Flan also comes from German (specifically Old High German flado, a sort of flat cake) via French and Medieval Latin. Our Crème caramel page makes this clear, and the OED confirms it. And neither of our two words is anywhere near poncy enough for me to use – I just point disdainfully. --Antiquary (talk) 13:55, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Maybe I'm getting overly pedantic, but flan and quiche are both English words derived from identical French words. Here is picture of the alternate meaning of flan [3]. --Daniel 23:36, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

If someone ordered flan in a British restaurant and you served them that, they'd have trading standards onto you. It's a creme caramel. DuncanHill (talk) 23:40, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

In the Americas and the Spanish speaking world, the situation is reversed. When someone orders a "flan" here, they don't expect a crust or a fruit topping. --Daniel 23:43, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Just checked OED online, it has flan as "An open tart containing fruit or other filling" but not as a creme caramel. DuncanHill (talk) 23:46, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

See [4], [5], [6] all of which give the custard definition. It is a British English versus American English issue. --Daniel 23:51, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

We should have a warning on this page that people should specify what sort of English they are asking about. DuncanHill (talk) 23:59, 12 February 2011 (UTC)

Or we could hope that longstanding contributors would have enough sense to consider that possibility before derailing the question... Matt Deres (talk) 00:35, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

I answered the question entirely correctly in British English, and commented on how odd the question seemed. You can call that "derailing" if you like, but I'll chalk that up to the difference between American and British English too. DuncanHill (talk) 00:43, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Like Duncan, I was completely unaware of the American meaning of "flan", or of the fact that it had a different meaning there. "Flan" and "quiche" may both be French loanwords, but "flan" is completely naturalised, whereas "quiche" retains not one but two instances of foreign spelling. -- ColinFine (talk) 00:52, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Reminds me of the story about when Bush and Cheney walk into a diner, and Bush says to the waitress, "Honey, how about a quickie?". The waitress blanches and...never mind, I think the punch line's obvious at this point. --Trovatore (talk) 02:47, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

More seriously, to my intuition, quiche is at least as naturalized as flan. In fact I keep wanting to spell it flán, as I imagine it's spelled in Spanish. But is that a hyper-foreignism, like habañero or latté? --Trovatore (talk) 02:52, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Update: Yes, it's a hyper-foreignism. The Spanish article is at es:flan, whereas es:flán is a redlink. --Trovatore (talk) 23:56, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

In Spanish, the accent mark exists because you normally place vocal emphasis on the second-to-last syllable in a polysyllabic word. An accent mark is used only when you have to put the emphasis on a different syllable than the one that would be expected; it goes atop that syllable's vowel. A monosyllabic word like flan would never need an accent because there is no ambiguity about where the accent must be placed. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:04, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

British here as well and I was too completely stumped as to the OP's question, to me it was asking the difference between a liquid and a pastry which made my mind boggle until the answers came in. Nanonic (talk) 02:05, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Which is fair enough and I regret that my post came out snarkier than I intended, but all this confusion can only have hinged on assuming Trovatore was in on some kind of private joke with the OP and then failing to look up flan in that great online encyclopedia we're always talking about where the very first line is "This article is about the open pie. Flan may also refer to sweet custard desserts such as crème caramel..." And when someone actually answers the OP, people again fail to click the link provided where it states everything quite clearly: "In Spanish-speaking countries and in North America, flan refers to crème caramel. This was originally a Spanish usage, but the dish is now best-known in the United States in a Latin American context. Elsewhere, including in Britain, flan usually means a custard tart (French flan pâtissier), sometimes with a fruit topping." I'm sorry; I know I'm being grumpy, but we say right at the top of the page that searching Wikipedia can usually answer your question, so it bugs me when people who know better assiduously avoid following that advice. Matt Deres (talk) 04:50, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Custard pie fight... 81.131.40.253 (talk) 05:31, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. ---Sluzzelin talk 09:23, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

As the OP had already said the definitions on Wikipedia had not been helpful, why would I have then gone and read them when there's a bloody good dictionary on my table already? DuncanHill (talk) 13:13, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps the OP should consult websites that are specifically about food, like Betty Crocker or Rachael Ray or like that. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:09, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

(From someone equally confused as DuncanHill at the original question, since flan in Britain and in France and in a lot of other countries means a kind of pastry) - I think the idea of stipulating that questioners state the country or cultural context in which they ask the question would be really helpful. Sometimes the questioner (and the responders) would have no idea that a concept would be culturally specific. I think the OP probably had no idea flan meant a pastry in the non Spanish/American half of the world, just as those living in the other half mostly have no idea that it means creme caramel in Spanish/American usage. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 22:48, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

In France, are you sure? See fr:flan (dessert). It does mention the pastry version as one variant, but the picture has no pastry. (It doesn't look like a Spanish flan either; there's no caramel. It looks like a panna cotta more than anything.) --Trovatore (talk) 23:47, 13 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes I agree - in the UK, if you go to the supermarket and buy a "flan base", you will find it is made of sponge cake, and then you will top it with fruit in a sweet fruity glaze. In my experience, quiches are universally savoury, and flans are sweet. How the other half of the world do speak, eh! --TammyMoet (talk) 10:30, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

For France - I was thinking of what on French wikipedia is, I think, called a fr:Flan pâtissier - a dessert rather than a liquid material. --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 12:58, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Well you learn something new every day. Until this moment I had never heard of "flan" being anything other than an open pastry tart with some kind of sweet or savoury filling. In my opinion, asking the difference between custard and flan is like asking the difference between a coat and a pair of shoes - both things you wear but otherwise totally different concepts. But "custard" = "flan"? ... Still shaking head in disbelief. Astronaut (talk) 04:05, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

I think the answer to the OP's question got a bit confused in all the head scratching from both sides of the Atlantic. So, in American English, does "flan" exclusively mean a type of custard? Is it like runny, pouring custard or a more solid, tofu-like dessert? Is it another name for creme caramel or is it another name for a type of dessert which is like a creme caramel? Does it have any biscuit or cake-based base to it? --PalaceGuard008 (Talk) 16:38, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Look at this page from allrecipes.com — the first five hits (except pineapple flan, which is a pastry) all appear to be variants of what Americans and Mexicans would call a flan. Comet Tuttle (talk) 18:05, 14 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, well done, an American website with a preponderance of American usage. Try looking at allrecipes.co.uk, which kicks off with a gruyere flan, a fruit flan, and a rather tasty-sounding chicken flan. DuncanHill (talk) 13:38, 15 February 2011 (UTC)