Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 February 18

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February 18

Deleting message in Facebook

Is there any way to delete a single message in a message thread in Facebook? 117.97.228.34 (talk) 05:45, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Only if you're the one that posted the comment, or it was something posted on your wall. Hover your mouse pointer over the post and a little X should appear in the upper right corner of it, which you can click to remove the post. I don't know if Facebookk's mobile phone interface offers this option. Zunaid 09:59, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

With the iPhone you just swipe sideways on your comment and a "delete" box appears... gazhiley.co.uk 14:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

The question is about private messages, not comments or wall posts. And the answer is no, you cannot. --Viennese Waltz 12:42, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Why does LibreOffice need 50,000 Euros to set up a "not for profit" organisation?

LibreOffice is trying to raise 50,000 Euros to start a not for profit organisation. This seems a bit steep, you can start a company in the UK for £100. I would certainly want to know why they need so much before donating to them. -- Q Chris (talk) 09:11, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Wild guess: lawyers' fees, trademark registration, web hosting, attending conferences and expos, office expenses, employing some admin staff? But I'm sure if you contact them they'll tell you (have you tried that?) --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

"If you want to contact representatives of The Document Foundation for questions about your donation, our spokespeople will be happy to answer your e-mail."[1]; contact info[2]. --Colapeninsula (talk) 09:57, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

"Not for profit" just means not paying dividends to shareholders. It doesn't rule out salaries to employees, investments in buildings and projects or advertising. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cuddlyable3 (talk • contribs)

According to their web page, To legally form The Document Foundation in Germany, a minimum of 50,000 Euros is needed. Additionally, All donations will be used for establishing The Document Foundation, and any funds remaining after the fifty-thousand euro capital stock has been accumulated will be fed directly into the future foundation's budget to cover operating expenses. They go on to explain why they want to establish the organization in Germany. decltype (talk) 10:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

It is because under German law, the charity will have to be 'supervised' by the local authority to make sure it is keeping to its charter. Local authorities obviously don't want people setting up dozens of little homes for stray cats as foundation charities.[3]--Aspro (talk) 10:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

"A woman called the BBC earlier..."

Before the Great Storm of 1987 in the UK, when Michael Fish made his infamous claim that there wouldn't be a hurricane he said a woman had called in to warn about a hurricane but, don't worry, there wouldn't be one. A woman called Anita Hart claims this was her. Is there any evidence either verifying or disproving that claim, or anything other than the youtube clip linked to on the wiki page? 130.88.162.13 (talk) 12:19, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

The article Great Storm of 1987 has one badly drafted and context-free reference to Anita Hart. To decide on the veracity or otherwise of her claim, we would need to see where and how she is claiming that the woman was her. --Viennese Waltz 12:38, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, I was wondering if anyone know where any such information could be found. For example, what program is that youtube clip from? Looks like More4 to me, but that only narrows it down. 130.88.162.13 (talk) 12:43, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

There are interviews with Anita Hart in various newspaper articles including the Daily Mirror [4] and the Daily Telegraph [5], so she is real enough, but it doesn't answer the question as to whether she was the person. Mikenorton (talk) 13:02, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

This BBC article states it was Anita Hart. Dalliance (talk) 13:05, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

And the Independent too. Nanonic (talk) 13:14, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Tyre rolling radius

I need to work out the rolling radius of various tyres, e.g. 195/65 R15. How do I do so? Thanks! 192.150.181.62 (talk) 14:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Rolling radius? Do you mean rolling resistance? Maybe our tire size article will help you. Dismas|^(talk) 14:58, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Or perhaps circumference? 2πr is what you need once you've found r, which can be derived from the ratio of width to height. Note that the circumference will gradually diminish as the tire wears. Acroterion _(talk) 15:05, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Or do you mean the radius between the center of the tire and the patch that is in contact with the road, allowing for the flattening of the tire at that point due to the weight of the vehicle? If so, you'll need a lot more info than just the tire size. Dismas|^(talk) 15:09, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I have no idea what I mean, I've just been told to do it, but it is rolling radius that I need. I think I have it worked out: (First number multiplied by second number divided by 100), plus ((third number multiplied by 25) divided by 2). I don't know if I'm correct but I'll just go with that. Thanks! 192.150.181.62 (talk) 15:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Why were you told to do it? Is this for a class? etc. That might help us understand what you need. Dismas|^(talk) 15:32, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

In the example you've given, the tyre width is given by the 195 (in mm) and its aspect ratio (the tyre's height divided by its width) is 65%. So its height is 126.75 mm. The 15 tells you that it is fitted to a wheel 15" in diameter. So its radius (not taking account of changes from the flattened contact patch, inflation, etc.) is the tyre height plus half the wheel diameter = 126.75 + (15 * 25.4)/2 = 317.25mm.--Phil Holmes (talk) 17:09, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I think he must have been told to workout the 'effective' rolling radius because 7½ inches is a little too obvious even to a grease monkey.--Aspro (talk) 17:57, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, not many people run their cars on wheels without tyres, but, as Phil said above, just add the tyre height to your 7½ inches. In practice, the pressure to which the tyre is inflated will change the effective radius, but I presume that "rolling radius" just means rolling the tyre along the ground as fitters do before fitting and pressurising the tyre. the general formula is n*m/100 + r/2 for an "n/m Rr" tyre, but you need to convert either n (given as mm) or r (given as inches) to the other units first using one inch = 25.4 mm. Dbfirs 00:02, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

That just muddies the waters. Have you ever understood how a Torque wrench works and how it is used? The effective rolling radius affects the torque and thus the force applied to the road surface. --Aspro (talk) 00:16, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I know about torque depending on radius, but that calculation would be much more difficult and would have a variable answer depending on tyre pressure, cornering, road surface and many other variables. Dbfirs 07:47, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

The 317.25mm was the answer I needed, Thank you all so much! 192.150.181.62 (talk) 18:48, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Parking tickets on an old license plate

Hello all. My girlfriend moved to New Jersey from a different state. While she still had her old state license plates on her car, she received a parking ticket. She never paid said ticket and has since changed her license plates to Jersey plates. Can this somehow come back to bite her? Thank you in advance. --Endlessdan (talk) 15:41, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

This is borderline legal advice, but I think for something this minor it is fine. I think it is a possible that the ticket will eventually catch up with her. It varies form state to state, but in California, unpaid parking tickets get reported to the DMV and they will make you pay before you can renew your license (done every ten years I think). Your girlfriend probably still has here drivers license from her home state the question is: will New Jersey report this to the home state? If they don't, then she is in the clear, if they do then she will have to pay when she renews probably with some kind of fee or penalty. The penalty shouldn't be too big so I wouldn't worry about it. I received a couple of parking tickets on the UC Santa Barbara campus once, never paid them and something with the campus police system caused them to vanish. On the other hand I got a parking ticket in Italy in a rental car and it eventually caught up with me through the rental agency. This is just internet advice, so don't hold me to it if the police smash her door down and arrest her for this unpaid ticket. --Daniel 18:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Identifying a poem

Can you identify a poem If I quote a passage from it. e.g. Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh,shadows of the evening steal across the sky.

Yes. That is the first verse of "Now the Day Is Over" by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924). A search engine such as Google is the quickest way to answer similar queries. Gandalf61 (talk) 15:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Agreed. When searching, put the phrase you want to find in "inverted commas" (speech marks, quotation marks, or whatever you call them) and that makes the search engine look for the exact phrase. Alansplodge (talk) 18:01, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Space colonization

I am enrolled in a secret government program and will be teleported to Mars in a week. I also have insider knowledge that the volcanoes are going to destroy Earth in 200 years. In the meantime my Mars base will receive a steady supply of ten tons of payload and ten people from Earth per year. The life support of the base is already covered for a thousand years, at which point the equipment will begin to fail.

Funny thing is, this program is so secret that we can't risk having a sizable support team. That means that I get to decide what is shipped in from Earth. Like I already mentioned, I get 2000 tons and 2000 people over 200 years, and then we have 800 years to establish a society advanced enough to maintain our life support. I'm clueless about how to make that happen. Please help me help the mankind survive the volcanic apocalypse. --85.77.201.52 (talk) 16:52, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Is this some special meaning of the word "secret" of which we were previously unaware?--Shantavira|^{feed me} 17:12, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Possibly its the kind of "secret" where they give you medication, lol. Heiro 17:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, there are many new meanings of "secret". My favourite is where some celebrity has the audacity to get married but not invite every journalist in the world to the wedding. The media then describe it as a "secret wedding". Which is odd because I've never heard of a wedding that was open to anyone who cared to come along. No, weddings are essentially private affairs, and if you don't get an invite, tough. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 17:37, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Actually, in some Christian denominations wedding ceremonies are always public, as all wedding ceremonies must take place on church grounds, and church grounds must always be open to all. And of course wedding ceremonies on public lands are open to anyone who turns up - you can't shoo someone away from a public beach just because you've decided to get married there. --NellieBly (talk) 00:44, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

I know. I was at a wedding last year deep in the bowels of a sub-tropical rain forest, and 2 bushwalkers ambled along. They couldn't get past without disrupting the proceedings, so they just hung around and took in the ceremony.

I was talking about private ceremonies at the celebrity's house, to which the guests have been invited but anybody else is not welcome - particularly prying journalists. There are plenty of witnesses and it's all above board legally. It's being done in private, but that doesn't make it "secret". -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 08:39, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

So now you can't say you "never heard of a wedding that was open to anyone who cared to come along". ¨¨¨¨

Sounds like a fun homework assignment. - Akamad (talk) 17:23, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You just need to order one closed ecological system, which I shouldn't think needs to weigh as much as 2,000 tons. You probably don't need most of the 2,000 people, unless you're going to mulch them. Here is the Colonization of Mars article. 213.122.39.16 (talk) 17:43, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Your most compelling need will be for power, so you should ship a nuclear reactor and a whole bunch of fuel to run it. Your next need will be for a variety of materials such as iron, silicon, carbon, etc, but there's no way you will be able to ship adequate amounts of these, so you'll need to ship mining equipment that can get power from your nuclear reactor. If you can't find Martian sources for the basic materials you need, you're screwed. You'll also need some refining equipment, machine tools and such so that you can fabricate parts from the materials you mine. Finally you'll need to ship as much computer equipment as you can crowd in, because making modern computer chips requires far more resources than you'll be able to get until you have a large society up and running. Looie496 (talk) 18:53, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

You will probable find Critical path & Program Evaluation and Review software very useful for planning this. Don't forget to include sufficient condom manufacturing capacity. I would be very happy to supply a list of politicians, celebrities, telephone sanitizers and the like, for you to take with you as your companions. Bon voyage.--Aspro (talk) 19:22, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Noted earlier was an idea to ship some kind of nuclear reactor, but I have a couple of doubts about that. First, you are not going to have a large water supply with which to cool your reactor, and the large quantities of lead shielding will use up a lot of your available cargo. I am not sure, but I think several hundred tons of solar panels might be a better bet for supplying your power needs. Googlemeister (talk) 20:22, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Water? A nuclear powered Stirling heat engine is quite capable of radiating wast heat into space on the way there and on Mar it can be used for melting ice. Mar is very cold (its minus 50 on a warm day), so the waste heat will be very useful. NASA has had them running for thousands of hours already [6]. Solar panels will hardly supply the all the power the colonists will need for their cannabis lamp and hydroponics systems (remember, the DEA is going to get roasted along with the rest of us).--Aspro (talk) 20:47, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

I might add also that a Plutonium-238 heat source will not necessarily require much shielding for the reasons given here.--Aspro (talk) 21:13, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Think the OP ought to his skates on and start packing. According to this, the Yellowstone super-volcano may be in "early stages" of eruption! I'd like to see how The Doctor and Amy Pond is going to get us out of this one. --Aspro (talk) 21:05, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

"Can you imagine what will happen if Los Angeles is hit with a 9.0 quake, New York City is destroyed by a terrorist-planted atomic bomb, World War III breaks out in the Middle East, the banks and the stock markets collapse, Extraterrestrials land on the White House lawn, food disappears from the markets, some people disappear, the Messiah presents himself to the world, and all in a very short period of time?" That's a hell of a pitch for a movie! DuncanHill (talk) 22:55, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Yeah! Spielberg has another box office hit on his hands. Its laughing all the way to the bank time. Shame about Los Angeles though. Still, you can't make omelettes without braking a few eggs. --Aspro (talk) 23:06, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

We have decided to not take you. schyler (talk) 21:09, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Ah. Are you going too... excellent! --Aspro (talk) 21:16, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Don't for get to close the hatch before you light the blue touch paper.--Aspro (talk) 21:18, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Don't forget to take some classics to read like The Little Match Girl. Mind you, if you left this author's works behind... it would allow you to joke Look Ma... No Hans :-)--Aspro (talk) 22:27, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Um I do hope all of you realise we left yesterday... If you're still typing from earth, well you should have realised when we said secret, we didn't mean to talk about it on the RD. As for those wondering about the OP, they found out by accident. We considered eliminating them but decided we could push up our plans by a few days instead so gave them a meaningless task to distract them while we went about our plans in actual secret. As they proved by posting here (we considered oversight but that was annoying because we'd need to hire someone to eliminate the oversighter then someone to eliminate that person, then someone...), they weren't a good fit for the mission... Nil Einne (talk) 13:44, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Only one day is left, only one day. We are leaving the others, we are going away. Let them sleep who do not know we leave at dawn. TomorrowTime (talk) 16:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

You all do realize that this is part of a greater plot, right? after all the excitable multitudes will demand being teleported to Mars, the earth will be a relatively empty and pretty happy place for the rest of us who decide to stay. --Ludwigs2 23:17, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Shush! What's got into you? Do you want everybody to know? Lets wave goodbye (and bid good riddance) to the parasites that blight this planet first, before we let on about our greater plan! P.S. You have a yellow discus thingy after you're comment. Citizens that resort to such subliminal signaling will find themselves on spaceship Number Two!--Aspro (talk) 23:39, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

PPS. Those who write "you're" (short for "you are") where a simple possessive pronoun "your" would suffice will be defenestrated into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, and will probably miss their chance to be teleported to Mars. :) -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 08:39, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Excellent. I haven't witnessed a good defenestration for years. Could be a real problem for the subject if it's done on a space ship. HiLo48 (talk) 10:58, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes that was one of the cover stories to distract those we decided to leave behind. (We couldn't tell everyone they were in charge of deciding what to ship!) Thanks for posting it here thereby proving you were worth of the story. Nil Einne (talk) 13:48, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Mars is already occupied,you've screwed the pooch.Ulla..Hotclaws (talk) 20:48, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Shouldn't be a problem, we'll just enlist the help of the humblest thing on Earth, our microscopic allies - bacteria. Minute, invisible bacteria. TomorrowTime (talk) 08:02, 20 February 2011 (UTC)

Justin Bieber film(UK)

Hopefully from someone who's been to see the wretched thing,which film trailers play before the actual screening of the movie?I've been asked to find out,but I would rather not spend my money on queuing up for ages with a load of squawking girls to watch him poncing around :) Lemon martini (talk) 22:20, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

Oh, I feel for you. One gets to eighteen and then suddenly.. you're zooming down-hill into middle age and finding an affinity for woollen cardigans and Val Doonican records. Oh, they don't make records like that any more. --Aspro (talk) 22:37, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

And it's hard to find genuine woollen cardigans these days. HiLo48 (talk) 07:51, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

You are so right! The wife attended an agricultural show last summer and there was this geyser there that had trained a flock of sheep to leap over fences. When I asked her why she had bought one of these ewes, she replied that my mother had said to her, that I could do with a new woolly jumper and this was the the first time she has seen any. --Aspro (talk) 23:42, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Just imagine what it is like when you are 80 and wish you you were 18 again!--85.211.161.177 (talk) 07:48, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

What film trailers are screened before the film would depend on the film or time of day, surely, along with ads if there were any. I'm not really sure what your question is. Are you looking for the trailer of the film? Or for film trailers in general? Chevymontecarlo 15:35, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure about that? Many times people have gone to see just the trailer of a film and then left before the film that they paid to see began. This has happened for films in the Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings franchises. It can really help a so-so movie just to have the trailer for a much more popular and anticipated movie shown before the main feature. Dismas|^(talk) 15:53, 19 February 2011 (UTC)

It occurs to me that not all theatres that are showing Movie A will necessarily be showing Movie B, so in general it would not be the case that the screening of the same movie at different theatres will be preceded by the same previews of other movies. -- Jack of Oz [your turn] 16:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)