Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2009 April 12

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April 12

Sneezing in the light

Why are many people able to induce a sneeze or hasten the onset of one by looking at a bright light? This is noticed many times when you walk out of a store or building on a bright day. jondn (talk) 00:31, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Photic sneeze reflex meltBanana 00:39, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

A friend calls that the Vampire Syndrome. Neswa (talk) 19:36, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

"Look up at the light and sneeze" is how a nurse summarized the phenomenon. Looking up increases tension in the mucosal membranes, which might be a factor in getting the incipient sneeze to finally occur. Also "One good sneeze deserves another." Sneezes are rarely one-off. Edison (talk) 05:29, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Artificial moonlight...light

Whenever I walk into the kitchen at night and there's a full moon out, it's always streaming through the kitchen window (and the glass door, if the curtains haven't been drawn). It creates a mysterious, mystical, and serene setting. Bummer this only happens thirty-six to thirty-nine times a year (the days before and after a "full" moon are full enough for me). But getting to the point, are there any lamps or light fixtures that are manufactured to recreate moonlight? A couple searches by me haven't turned up anything definite.--The Ninth Bright Shiner 00:46, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

'Moonlight' is actually pretty much the same thing as regular plain-vanilla sunlight. Since the Moon doesn't generate its own light, all we see is the sunlight reflected from its surface. There are some minor differences, but the Moon's surface is altogether a pretty neutral shade of gray.

You can verify this by looking at long-exposure photographs taken by moonlight — the colours are essentially identical to what you'd see by sunlight. (Check out the photo on this page here. It looks like a perfectly ordinary outdoor scene, until you notice the blue sky is speckled with stars and there is a glow of city lights on the horizon.)

The primary difference under moonlight is that the light is very dim, so your eyes aren't picking up color very clearly. Everything looks washed out and pale. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 01:02, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Neato. I didn't know that...BUT...can it be reproduced by man? From what little I know of lamps, it's a definite "hmmmmm..."--The Ninth Bright Shiner 01:25, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

How about this sort of thing? --jpgordon^∇∆∇∆ 01:58, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I guess what you want is a lightbulb whose color temperature approximates that of the Sun (they do exist!), masked somehow so that it's effectively dim. —Tamfang (talk) 08:19, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

this is quite moonlighty. Gwinva (talk) 01:54, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

That one says it gives off a green light, which doesn't sound like moonlight to me. The problem, as I see it, is that incandescent lights become more yellow at lower powers. Fluorescent lights don't usually go that dim. Perhaps an LED light could do the job ? The one jpgordon mentioned sounds like it might work, too. StuRat (talk) 10:23, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

At the extreme end of things, yes you certainly can reproduce it. Film and theatre lighting techs are doing it all the time, both for sunlight and moonlight (though often they create an effect that people think looks right rather than actually does). A good powerful light an an appropriate colour gel should do the trick, and a visit to your local theatrical lighting shop should produce some advice on what colour you want. Of course these things don't necessarily come cheap. DJ Clayworth (talk) 15:47, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Sunlight and moonlight effectively act as infinitely distant Point sources. That gives the light and shadows a particular 'look' that we notice. Just having a lamp that's the same color and brightness of the moon (or sun) will not give you the same "feel" that you're going for. The light-source has to be sufficiently far away to give you parallel shadows.

There's also a power of suggestion effect here. Everything seems more mysterious if you don't have to plug it in. APL (talk) 18:04, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I have a bright white LED reading lamp - the kind you clip onto the edge of a book. In a totally dark room - that produces a light that is both a point source and a close match for sunlight/moonlight. I think it's important that the light be really dim in a totally dark area because you need for your eyes to be using scotopic vision where all of the color is washed out and things have a blue-ish tint. SteveBaker (talk) 02:21, 14 April 2009 (UTC)

International knowledge of American suburban lifestyle

In my European travels, I have never seen a strip mall, nor have I seen a collection of chain-restaurants (Applebee's, TGI Friday's, etc.) dotting a giant parking lot outside a freeway interchange. That got me thinking -- do Europeans and other people from outside North America really have a conception of what the American suburban lifestyle is like? Do they have a sense of what most American neighborhoods look like, with their miles of half-acre home lots and every commercial building surrounded by its own parking lot? Everything designed with the assumption that everyone will drive to and from each place, with unused sidewalks and empty buses? I realize that foreigners watch a lot of American TV and movies, but those tend to take place in big cities (The Cosby Show, Cheers, Friends, etc.) rather than in the suburbs where most Americans actually live. And when international travelers visit America, they usually visit places like Manhattan and Chicago, not Long Island or Arlington Heights, Illinois. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 03:23, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I like the question but don't necessarily agree with your position that sitcoms generally take place in big cities. Roseanne, Malcolm in the Middle, ALF, Bewitched, Leave It to Beaver, Happy Days, and Blossom all took place in suburban locales. Some were closer to big cities than others (I think Blossom was supposed to be near L.A. but it was basically the 'burbs). That's to say nothing of the more rural shows such as The Andy Griffith Show or Green Acres which likely also found their way across the pond. Sorry if this is off topic from the original question though... I'd really like to see that answered. Dismas|^(talk) 03:37, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I would be surprised if you can generalize about what people might know about North America. People around the world who have internet access or who are travellers will know more about North America than North Americans know about them. And more of them are travellers, though North Americans lead the pack in internet access. In the late 80s a Swiss engineer who was working at the time with a Hong Kong printing house came to Canada on a business trip. He had never before been to North America. All the way into the city from the airport where I met him he exclaimed about all the "wasted space", with one-storey commercial and industrial buildings on huge lots surrounded by parking. So, there was one person who was very surprised but that was a long time ago and he came from two countries where usable, flat land was at a premium. (As an aside: there are strip malls in Spain, both in towns -like Malaga, for example- but like their North Amercian counterparts built on the outskirts, and also along highways. The road from Mijas Costa to Mijas Pueblo, for example has six or seven of them, most anchored by either a furniture store or a supermarket, and with private parking, though not to the extent we see on the west side of the pond. I would agree with you about the restaurants, however; I think Europeans generally take their food seriously, and the roadside cafe is frequently family-run and worth a trip, not things that can be said of the list you have presented.) // BL \\ (talk) 03:45, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Well all I can say is you've obviously not been to the UK, where McDonald's and KFC are on almost every roundabout!--TammyMoet (talk) 10:07, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

nor have I seen a collection of chain-restaurants (Applebee's, TGI Friday's, etc.) dotting a giant parking lot outside a freeway interchange... I'm not an expert in American/British dialect, but if you mean "A collection of chain-restuarants dotting a giant car park at a motorway service station", you get them something like every twenty miles in England. Normally the restaurants in question are McDonald's KFC, Burger King, Little Chef. Vimescarrot (talk) 11:52, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I was referring more to collections of sit-down family restaurants in a suburban locale than to the fast-food places you might see alongside a long-distance freeway/motorway. See [1] for an example -- those squares on the south side of Polaris Parkway are all chain sit-down restaurants of the Applebee's type, I believe. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 15:07, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Isn't there a major difference in that the UK locations that Vimescarrot refer to are intended for motorists (i.e. travellers), while the strip malls discussed in the original entry are the main place where the local population go (by car) to shop and eat? Also commenting on what we see in tv shows: Most of the sitcoms mentioned are off course filmed in studios, and only use establishing shots to set the location. If somebody in e.g. According to Jim, would go to e.g. a hardware store, all they might show is a store front, giving no idea about the surroundings. I'd say that films and tv have given me quite a decent idea of how the residential areas of the suburbs look, while the suburban commercial districts and their complete inaccessibility without a car was something that I only had been told of by others. /Coffeeshivers (talk) 13:23, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I'm a Brit, living in Texas - I don't think the situation is all that different. In the UK, land is at more of a premium than here in the US - so most malls have multistorey parking rather than acres and acres of parking lots. The crappy weather means that outdoor "strip-malls" are less attractive as new development than indoor malls - so in the UK, we have more of the latter and less of the former. The sheer tedious repetition of the same design over and over is also not there in the UK - but that's because in many parts of the US, these developments are happening on virgin land and the developers can be lazy and simply replicate here what they did 10 miles further up the freeway. In the UK, you have to fit in with existing properties and road layouts - so it's rare to be able to simply replicate the same design over and over. My only real shock when coming to Texas was not about the individual malls - which seem reasonably familiar - but the fact that you can drive for hundreds of miles through some states and see the same collections of businesses and living space repeated every 5 to 10 miles with zero distinguishing features. In some towns and cities in the UK, the planning regulations limit the ability of a new store to move in right next to some other store that has the same business...so in the US, you find not one shoe store but five shoe stores - all together. In the UK, you're more likely to have one of each kind of store at a particular location.

To the extent that I've found the US surprising, it's that (more than once) I've stepped out of a WalMart (or other 'big box' store) that I've never been to in Austin - which has the precise same internal and external layout to one in Dallas and been surprised at how a place can seem so familiar when I've never been there before. Kinda like deja-vu - but more persistant and repeatable!

Another difference is the size of stores. If I want (say) hobby supplies here in Texas, I might go to a "Hobby Lobby" or a "Micheals". These are GIGANTIC stores - the size of a UK "Tesco" supermarket or bigger. If I wanted to do that in the UK, I'd probably go to a tiny store in the high street that was run by two little old ladies who have about the same variety of stock (but in much smaller quantities) crammed into a store no bigger than my living room. But again, that comes about from the lack of availability of cheap land and the need to fit in with existing street plans. There is a trade-off here. Those two little old ladies know all that there is to know about everything they sell - you'll get help and advice whether you ask for it or not...but there is a possibility that they don't have the exact thing you need. Go to a Hobby Lobby and the extent of the help you'll get is "That's on aisle 23" - although you can be reasonably certain that if the thing you want actually exists, it'll be in that store someplace.

SteveBaker (talk) 16:12, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

We do have many "strip malls" in the UK, although I imagine they are smaller than those in the US. The planning regulations mean they are where possible built within a town or city rather than out in the countryside - probably due to the planners wanting to preserve the countryside, and to prevent the centre of towns from becoming unused and run-down. I disagree that we have worse weather in the UK than in the US - we do not have the extremes of hot and cold that Americans get. One of the pleasures of the UK is being able to walk quickly to hundreds of different shops in a city- or town-centre.

We do have many large DIY warehouses in the UK, such as Homebase, Focus, B&Q. It is not true to say that planners prevent similar shops being near to each other - I can think of several places where you get similar shops next to each other.

What would be unusual to British people would be the size of the plot sizes and room sizes - everywhere here is much smaller. Sadly, to be able to afford that spaciousness here, then you would have to literally be a millionare. On the other hand we have public footpaths which do not seem to exist in other countries, so you can walk around the countryside even if you do not own any land. (Not owning any land in the US must be terribly claustrophobic). And in the UK it is rare for a road not to have a sidewalk, or pavement as we would say.

89.242.147.172 (talk) 12:18, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

I recognise your experience with the repeated layouts of the large stores - but that's also true to an extent here in the UK, and transatlantically. An American friend reckoned she could always find her way around a B & Q which she visited in Scotland, because it was laid out identically to the Home Depot near her home in the SF Bay Area - the two chains being part of a single multinational. My view is biased by experience - here in the UK, I do in fact live close to several strip malls, but I know this is unusual - high street shopping augmented by individual supermarkets remains the norm here. (Oh, and I know of a very good model railroad store on Van Ness Ave, SF, which corresponds closely to your (accurate) UK 'two little old ladies' store description.) AlexTiefling (talk) 20:12, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

Going back to one point raised by the OP - UNUSED SIDEWALKS???? What sidewalks??? My wife and I stayed recently in San Diego on Hotel Circle South and thought it might be nice to stroll into the town centre (downtown I think it might be called) and after about 100 yards outside our hotel the sidewalk petered out and we were literally walking in the gutter. That lesson was quickly learned and we reverted to using taxicabs as we had chosen not to drive ourselves in a city we did not know (on the wrong side of the road). Later on, we caught the red trolley to an out of town shopping mall that lived on both sides of a dual-carriageway and there was no pedestrian crossing facility so we gingerly crossed from one side to the central reservation, hoping to find a gap in the traffic so we could complete our adventure to the far side. Horns were honking, fists were raised, lights were flashing, heads poked out of windows and abuse was shouted at us (I am white from the UK and was accused loudly of being a wetback). But did anyone stop and wave us across???? No chance. Until a motor-cycle cop happened along and he positioned himself in the centre of the freeway and waved us across, much to the annoyance of the cars behind him. And then he profusely apologised on behalf of the San Diego citizenry and said that they simply don't comprehend out-of-towners like us choosing to walk. I still have his photograph with my wife and myself posing beside him and his GERMAN motor cycle and will always remember him as the ONLY gentleman we met in that lovely city. American suburbia??? Toytown.92.23.90.215 (talk) 19:17, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

My knowledge of American walking comes from Bill Bryson, where he mentions that in america for the most part people don't walk and will use a car for the shortest trips. As for the UK, yes we have occasional groups of big warehouse shops surrounded by car park, but you don't get it that often, and big shopping centres here are usually supplied with multi-storey car parks, which IMO make more sense, as you don't need to walk so far. -mattbuck (Talk) 19:52, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

But see, that's the thing -- Europeans hear Americans drive everywhere and assume it's because we're lazy, when in fact it has more to do with the layout of American suburbs, as the anonymous user above can attest.

One thing that surprises me from this conversation is Steve's comment that in the UK, planning regulations limit the ability of a store to locate next to other stores of the same type. That sounds to me like an anticapitalist and consumer-unfriendly way to protect existing businesses from competition -- or is there another reason behind it? -- Mwalcoff (talk) 04:11, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

It's more that, when you have limited space, having a lot of shoe shops might mean you have no food shops, or clothes shops, or hardware stores, or... you get the idea. It's the idea that a town should have a variety of facilities so that people can do their shopping. While visiting the hammock district is useful if all you want is to buy a hammock, it's not so good if you want to get food for the weekend, clothes, tea towels, and a birthday present (as well as a hammock). It's about trying to keep local high streets useful for locals. 217.43.141.59 (talk) 16:41, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I do not agree that similar shops are prevented from opening near each other - as I say above I can think of several places where similar shops are next to each other. One example among many is Durham in northern england, whetre every other shop seems to be a shoe shop, or at least it was last time I visited. 89.242.147.172 (talk) 13:22, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

That limit is certainly in Canada, and I'm willing to bet that it's there in the Good-ole competition-friendly US as well. Usually it's legislated at the local level, and rather than being explicit it's more likely that the planning authorities won't let two big competing box stores build next to each other. It's hardly ever in the interest of the community, as it almost always results in one driving the other out of business. DJ Clayworth (talk) 20:15, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Partly it's the sidwalks, but partly it is the attitude of North Americans. It's not so much laziness as simply an assumption that a car is always the way to travel, no matter how short. a distance. I walked to a friend's house to meet a few people, which took me less than five minutes. When I left my host said "Where's your car?". I said I had walked she said "Really?" as if I had ridden a unicycle. Even when I said it had taken less than five minutes she was utterly incredulous. DJ Clayworth (talk) 20:27, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Heck, I live in the USA, and I was surprised at the lack of sidewalks outside of the north east. I tried to walk around Fort Worth and felt like I was taking my life into my hands and made to feel like I was doing something vaguely anti-social by not using a car.

In a New England city there would have been sidewalks everywhere, and on a nice day they'd be filled with people. Apparently, in Texas people drive. You tell someone you're going to walk four blocks down to a diner and they look at you like you're crazy. If you want to walk, you drive to a park and walk there. Very strange. APL (talk) 15:22, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

These stories remind me of those told by someone I know who went to a conference in the US (can't remember where). When it came time to go for lunch (or something) most of the participants (mostly Americans) decided to wait for a taxi, whereas my friend asked how far it was (answer: not very) so decided to walk. It took about 10 minutes I believe and of course my friend got there before most of the people waiting for a taxi. And it was a health related conference so most of them were medical professional! Nil Einne (talk) 12:44, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

In the U.S. there is a movement called "New Urbanism" which sets out to redesign the way people live by returning to a walking-centered urban lifestyle. In theory, you design Mixed-use development so that people can live and work and shop all in one small area, so they won't have to drive. In practice, what you end up with is a little island with a shopping mall, an office park, and a condo high-rise all sharing a big parking lot. The people that live in the condo don't necessarily work in the office park, and lots of people drive in from outside to do their shopping. It's a nice idea, and it can be somewhat aesthetcically pleasing, as it gives the "illusion" of being in a real city; which of course you aren't. You're still in the suburbs, just in a little Disnified version of what a city is supposed to look like. Some examples of these "new urban" centers I have been to include Easton Town Center in Ohio, North Hills in North Carolina, and the original "New Urban" city, Celebration, Florida. --Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:13, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

I was out in suburbs west of new york city somewhere, having never been to the USA before. I was stunned at how every every place had its own big car parks, not none of them even had side walks. I was in a motel about 200 yards down the road from a super market and fast food shops, and there was no conceiveable way to cross the road or even walk along the road, its was expected to drive everywhere.--Dacium (talk) 05:50, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

What is Zalgo?

I can't find out what Zalgo is, even Encyclopedia Dramatica doesn't explain it properly.--Clinkpush (talk) 12:10, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

You might have tried Google. According to this site, the first Google result, "Zalgo is an unusual internet phenomenon confined to a few select off beat forums and image boards. Its relevance here lies in its Lovecraftian edge. The objects of Zalgo are mostly popular, innocent comics turned ruthlessly to the dark side of Lovecraftian horror--and humor. More than anything else, the Zalgo comics are further evidence of Lovecraft's shockingly strange presence in today's online communities. Some would contend that Zalgo isn't necessarily Lovecraftian at all. While it isn't always explicitly so, it certainly holds many of the features common to peripheral Lovecraftian parodies, which is good enough to place it in the realm of weird inspired humor." LANTZY^TALK 14:40, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

I smell a redlink turning to a bluelink sometime soon... --Jayron32.talk.contribs 05:03, 13 April 2009 (UTC)

Still waiting! —Tamfang (talk) 06:15, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

UK PS2 in Barbados?

I have a PS2 that was purchased in the UK. If I bring it to Barbados, will it still work? I understand that the TV systems are different in the two countries. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 91.104.39.194 (talk) 20:27, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

As far as I know Barbados using an NTSC system rather than the PAL system the UK uses. They also use 110V electricity rather than the 220-240V the UK uses. You may have problems getting it to work. Exxolon (talk) 23:16, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

You're going to Barbados to play video games ? Are any of them simulations of a tropical paradise ? :-) StuRat (talk) 10:12, 13 April 2009 (UTC)