Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 February 17

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February 17[edit]

How many ¥ would the taxi fare be from Itoman, Okinawa to Cape Soya, Hokkaido?[edit]

Japan has some of the most expensive taxi fares in the world; much of them now exceeds $5/mile (which is about the fare of a limousine in the United States.)

Now, if we got Itoman's local taxi fares, and calculated in the distance the wheels actually move + the ferry fees + all the tolls to ride all the way up the nation, what would the total fares be once the passenger is about ready to disembark at Cape Soya? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.179.187.21 (talk) 01:13, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

A few thousand to ten or more thousand US dollars? The driver would also probably want to charge the return fare (that is standard in case of long-distance taxi routes in Poland - not inside the city but if you'd want to go i. e. between two voivodeships). Factor in any additional costs like food, accomodation... I suppose this is just a theoretical exercise, isn't it? --Ouro (blah blah) 09:21, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Presumably enough to buy you a brand new car you could ride yourself for the distance and keep after the journey :) Also, I'm wondering, why Itoman? If you are aiming strictly for distance, wouldn't Yonaguni be even further away from Soya? And if you are just going for extreme + settled points, there's settled islands further South from Itoman, like Ishigaki. TomorrowTime (talk) 09:52, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
According to this article, it was ¥359230 from Shinagawa Station, Tokyo to Dazaifu, Fukuoka in 2009. The distance is about 1000km. Oda Mari (talk) 10:46, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm guessing that's maybe one third of the distance the OP is suggesting, without ferries? So all in all maybe somewhere generously upwards from a million yen? TomorrowTime (talk) 11:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is the Kanmon Tunnel between Honshu and Kyushu. And the Seikan Tunnel between Honshu and Hokkaido. You only have to use ferry from Naha, Okinawa to Hakata, Fukuoka or Kagoshima, Kagoshima. I found similar cases. From Bunkyo, Tokyo to Hirakawa, Aomori, it was ¥205860. From Toyohashi, Aichi to Aomori, Aomori, 1115km, it was ¥352900. It might be somewhere between 0.7 to 0.9 million yen. Oda Mari (talk) 15:51, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Could taxi drivers in Japan also be persuaded to lower the price a bit considering the long distance? I know you can do that here in Slovenia, but in Japan I almost never rode taxis - with the exception of sometimes getting one when I was late coming from Tokyo and missed the last bus and the walk from Minami-Yono Station to Saitama University was just too daunting. TomorrowTime (talk) 20:14, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's possible. But I've never had a long distance ride. Oda Mari (talk) 05:43, 19 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

statue to Mary Wollstonecraft[edit]

I am fascinated to read, as a source to her article, that:

Many words were spoken on the subject of woman suffrage last night at the National Arts Club, 119 East Nineteenth Street, where the "Quaint" Club and the "Twilight" Club entertained at dinner the Men's League for Woman Suffrage. The battle raged mostly about Mary Wollstonecraft, an early advocate of woman's rights, in whose memory a statue is about to be erected. ("The Suffrage Cause Invades Men's Club". New York Times. May 25, 1910.)

What was the Quaint Club? What happened to the Twilight Club? And most importantly, was the proposed statue ever unveiled? BrainyBabe (talk) 01:57, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

According to this article in the Hackney Citizen, there is currently no such statue anywhere in the UK. One has been commissioned for Newington Green, though. --NellieBly (talk) 02:16, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In lieu of a statue there is a plaque on the site of Wollstonecraft's last residence in London [1]. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 09:17, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Isn't the article saying that the statue was going to be erected in New York, not in the UK? Corvus cornixtalk 18:29, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The Quaint Club was a monthly New York dining club, founded in 1882,"quaint+club"+tucker&q="quaint+club" which met at "the best hotel in town""quaint+club"+best+hotel&q="quaint+club"+"best+hotel" - in the late nineteenth century, this was apparently the Waldorf. The article you mention is the latest source I can find for its existence. The Twilight Club apparently held their 686th dinner in 1914, but I suspect that both it and the Quaint Club died out during or soon after World War I - by 1938, the Twilight Club was clearly long-gone.[2] Warofdreams talk 12:08, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I just know I'm going to muddle my indentations. Thank you all so far, but my curiosity remains unsatisfied.
I know of the plans for a British statue, and of the existing plaque in Camden. There is also a set of gates in Wollstonecraft's name at Spitalfields Market near where she was born, and the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day next month will see another plaque, this time at Newington Green, where she lived for a time. None of this helps me understand what happened to the statue mentioned in the article from a century ago; as Corvus cornix suggested, it seems that it was a New York project. Was it just a pipedream? Was it commissioned and then never finished? Was it sculpted but never installed in public?
If the statue was the brainchild of one of the three organisations mentioned, the Quaint and Twilight Clubs and the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, perhaps an answer might be found in a history of one of them. Does any such history exist? BrainyBabe (talk) 14:30, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

hilbert space[edit]

what is hilbert space and matrix application in quantum mechanicsSurajeet Ghosh (talk) 08:10, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Have you read Hilbert space#Quantum mechanics?--Shantavira|feed me 08:27, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

172[edit]

I hope this isn't deemed an inappropriate question, but I stumbled onto an old discussion in the WP archives, and, after looking at the edit history of the parties involved, I find some aspects of the story rather unbelievable. It was difficult to navigate the discussion in its entirety and to its conclusion (if one exists), so my question is: Was it ever resolved definitively whether User:172 and User:Cognition were really the same person? David Able 20:02, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Can you at least please give us a link to the "old discussion" you stumbled onto (or do you want us to find it by also stumbling onto it rather than going straight to it?) -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 20:45, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
User_talk:172#Indefinitely_blocked. From what I can gather, this is related to the whole LaRouche debacle a couple of years ago: see Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lyndon_LaRouche and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Lyndon LaRouche 2. Among other things, people were inserting material about LaRouche's view into different topics that probably really wouldn't warrant a mention of his view (i.e. the Bertrand Russel FAC: [3]). See also these ANI arcives: [4] and [5]. I wasn't around when this was going down, but the long and the short of it seems to be that the Wikipedia has put in place a de-facto ban on Lyndon LaRouche being mentioned in any articles that are not directly associated with him, and of banning any editor who is unfortunate enough to mention that he doesn't believe LaRouche should die in hell-fire. user:Cognition continued to make such insertions, and got banned. Someone decided to run a checkuser on Cognition (or maybe 127, and I can't find when that happened, but it must have been around September 2009, as that's when 127 got blocked). The weird thing is, 127's been a productive editor since forever (2002), and I guess a pretty staunch Anti-LaRouche editor (I haven't dug into his contributions much). Still, Wikipedia decides to block a productive editor because someone who can see his IP address has decided he's also an unproductive editor on another account. I have my own opinions about our blocking/banning policy, but this isn't a forum. Buddy431 (talk) 22:24, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
On a related note, this type of thing really highlights what is both one of Wikipedia's strengths, but also some of its weaknesses. Wikipedia keeps publicly viewable histories of all the edits to all its pages, (with certain exceptions like Oversight and Revision Deletion). This allows us to go back and reconstruct what's happened in the past: it's relatively hard to make all traces of some incident go away, as much as people try at times *cough* Rlevse *cough*. On the other hand, we do a pretty poor job of indexing or otherwise making this history easy to access. The history is preserved on each page, but on busy noticeboards and talkpages (where much of the action happens, so to speak), it quickly gets buried. If you're lucky, there's an archive that covers reasonably short periods of time, but even then, you're stuck searching through lots of posts that aren't necessarily related to each other. Check out Wikipedia:Administrators'_noticeboard/IncidentArchives, which is 2 years out of date. If you only have a vague idea of when or where something happened, God help you in trying to search the archives. Throw into this mix the one type of history that is not publicly viewable: deleted content, and trying to reconstruct what went on in the past can be pretty difficult. Buddy431 (talk) 22:56, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. I felt a bit nosy by asking this, but it is very frustrating when you get caught up in a old thread, only to have it fizzle out with no link to any continuation of the discussion. @JoO- I didn't link to it because I wasn't really sure where to link. I stumbled onto it in the process of trying to figure out what the difference in a "ban" and a "community ban" was, and ran across a list of banned users that someone had compiled (again, I don't know the link where I was at that point), but I found myself following a random thread of links and difs through a rather muddled, but very interesting incident, only for it to stop seemingly in mid-conversation on an old ANI board. My apologies if this was confusing. I figured some "old blood" Wikipedians would remember the incident, as it seemed like it was a big deal at the time. :) David Able 00:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Which car model?[edit]

Which car model is depicted at www.dominos.de? --84.61.155.241 (talk) 20:24, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's a ZAP Xebra. See [6]. Nanonic (talk) 22:55, 17 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]