Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2009 December 5

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December 5

Fluorine Uranium Carbon Potassium

I don't get the joke for this t-shirt. What exactly is the joke? I notice the first letter of the first three words start to form a swear word ("FUC"), but the P doesn't work. Sorry, can someone explain this joke to me? A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 03:23, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Potassium = K. Xenon54 / talk / 03:24, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

As an aside, the description running down next to it spells out "Innocuous shirt FTW." ~ Amory (u • t • c) 03:30, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Doh! Thanks. A Quest For Knowledge (talk) 03:32, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Mount Everest

Has anyone ever flown to the top of Mount Everest? jc iindyysgvxc (my contributions) 09:22, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

And landed? If not, there is apparently a company that will fly you past the peak. A quick Google search for Mount Everest Flights brings up a number of ghits. Dismas|^(talk) 09:27, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

A little more searching resulted in this find. So it looks like someone has landed on the summit. Dismas|^(talk) 09:30, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

However, the truth of that story has been questioned, see [1]. --NorwegianBlue ^talk 10:53, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

The FAI seem to have confirmed it: [2]. --Tango (talk) 12:07, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Durabrand DCT1481 combi tv/dvd player Funai

When trying to turn it on, instead of the normal constant red power light, instead it now often regularly blinks on and off about once a second. When this happens it will not start. Any solutions pleas? Where can I definately get a user guide or manual of any kind? I've searched lots of manual sites without success. Durabrand is a brand of Walmart (or Asda in the UK). I believe it was manufactured by Funai - does anyone know what their model number would be please? Their website does not recognise DCT1481. Thanks 92.27.148.85 (talk) 14:58, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Education

Do universities in the US accept gpa scores of 3.26 for prepatory college program?115.132.246.253 (talk) 15:01, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Which universities? Surely you aren't interested in all 4,300 or so U.S. universities/colleges for this. Individual educational institutions almost surely have their own policies on this (and their own ways of calculating high school GPA, as well, as a way of standardizing across such different curricula, much less across different countries). If you tell us the institutions you are interested in, we might be able to show you how to find that information. Even narrowing it down to "Ivy League schools" or "schools in California" will make this more straightforward. --Mr.98 (talk) 15:25, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Most universities will happliy answer questions about their admissions standards. If you have questions, your best option is to find the university's website, and call them directly on the phone. That is going to get you the fastest, most accurate results. --Jayron32 18:13, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Retirement Pension Plan address

What is the address to write for the Pullman Corporation retirement pension plan? The plan was for the Barnes Pumps Incorporated company in the city of Mansfield and the state of Ohio.

pink59 —Preceding unsigned comment added by Pink59 (talk • contribs) 15:10, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Who painted that?

(Warning: an image with explicit female nudity behind following link. If generous pubic hair grosses you out, no clicky!) This album cover is by a famous painter I'm pretty sure. Which painter is that? 88.112.56.9 (talk) 16:06, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Gustave Courbet. The painting is called L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) and it is from 1866. --Saddhiyama (talk) 16:16, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Ah yesss! Spank you very many! 88.112.56.9 (talk) 16:22, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

1080p in Youtube

On the Youtube.com homepage, an announcement is made for the release of 1080p support for videos. But since most people watch Youtube videos on a computer screen, is the "p" part (progressive scan) of 1080p irrelevant because all computer monitors, in contrast to TVs, are progressive scan anyways? Acceptable (talk) 22:32, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

Depends what the frame rate is - most online video doesn't normally go over 30 frames per second, whereas 1080p in broadcast television can be 1080p50 or 1080p60. But I think the main consideration is the fact that the term '1080p' has become established in the mind of quite a lot of people, only a minority of whom know what the 'p' stands for and what it means. Sam Blacketer (talk) 13:03, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I suspect the 1080p is mainly relevant for people downloading YouTube videos for use with other devices. And perhaps some of these devices and TVs that directly access YouTube will use the 1080p videos. --Bavi H (talk) 17:21, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm pretty sure it's redundant. (An interlaced video would require extra processing to be displayed on a modern computer monitor.) But redundant isn't the same as useless. Like Sam Blacketer says the "p" clues people into what the number means. If you just said that the videos had "1,080 lines of vertical resolution" most people would be no wiser, but if you say "1080p" even the layman instantly "gets" that you mean a high resolution HD image. APL (talk) 19:10, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

No - it's not irrelevant. The computer's display is indeed progressive scan (well - it COULD be interlaced - but they hardly ever are) - but that wouldn't in any way prevent Youtube from sending an interlaced video (1080i, perhaps) over the network and have the computer sort out how to display it. After all, if you have a flat-screen TV, it is just a grid of colored dots - it can be 'driven' by updating all of the pixels 60 times a second (1080p60) or by updating only every alternate scanline 60 times a second to deliver an entire new image only 30 times a second. The computer can just as easily only update half of the pixels in each field of the video. However, the reason YouTube uses progressive scan is that it's higher quality - and computer displays have the resolution to show that quality. 1080i would require very little extra work on the part of the computer - the advantage would be that it consumes half the bandwidth - produces still images that (on a monitor capable of 1080 scanlines) are identical in quality to 1080p - and only really looks worse during high speed action. SteveBaker (talk) 22:56, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I should point out that you don't really need any extra processing to display a 1080i video on a progressive display. You could just display it without deinterlacing. In fact this happens a lot more common then you may think. On high action scenes you will likely notice the lines (having said that, I know someone who never seems to notice). On low action scenes you may not. Most modern graphics cards have support for fancy deinterlacing filters that work well, but these are not always activated/used. If you have a CRT, you may find it has an interlaced mode although activating it on Windows Vista or Windows 7 may be difficult and I don't know why anyone would ever want to use it. And of course, an old style SDTV CRT can be a computer display (I had one until the TV broke recently). In fact this probably is more common then you think given the popularity of PVRs although the demise of these TVs in most of the developed worlds means they're likely a lot less common then they were. Nil Einne (talk) 13:03, 7 December 2009 (UTC)

Phone number question

If you get someone's phone number, and find out that the number itself is kind of cool on its own right, how do you tell a third party how cool it really is without that third party actually learning the number and being able to call its owner? JIP | Talk 23:17, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

It depends on what about it is cool. Is it a repeating pattern? If so, you can just change all instances of a particular digit to something else (eg change 474747 to 575757). If it is an ascending or descending sequence, try adding 1 to each digit (eg change 123456 to 234567). They key thing is to work out why it is cool and change it in some way that doesn't change that. --Tango (talk) 23:30, 5 December 2009 (UTC)

If you are in North America, change the area code if that doesn't affect any part of the cool. (Most effective in an area with multiple codes.)Aaronite (talk) 02:03, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

Of course, the trick would be to make sure that the resulting number doesn't send calls to some innocent fourth party, the innocent bystander of a drive-by posting. The experts here would know what are currently dummy or invalid Area Codes or City Codes. Or if it wouldn't affect what's remarkable about the number, leave out a digit or two or replace it with some non-keypad symbol like @, ~, § or ¶ —— Shakescene (talk) 03:08, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm guessing the "cool" feature is some special mathematical property. For example, say the phone number is a prime number. If there are only a few numbers that are both prime and valid phone numbers, then the third party might discover the correct phone number and call the person. In this case, it might be best not to tell the third party anything about the phone number at all. --Bavi H (talk) 17:35, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

There are 168 primes with 4 digits or less, 78,498 with 7 digits or less and if you include the area code there are 50,847,534 possible prime-number telephone numbers (well, it'll be less than that because some area codes don't exist and some short numbers (like 911) are 'reserved'...but there are at likely to be millions of prime-number phone numbers). SteveBaker (talk) 22:46, 6 December 2009 (UTC)

I was curious if the prime number thing was bad example, but too lazy to figure it out. :) The general advice was: If the cool feature is something that has a small overlap with valid phone numbers, then it's probably best not to tell. --Bavi H (talk) 02:57, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Maybe you can tell your friends about a cool number without insinuating that it is also somebody's phone number. If you don't format it in the usual (###) ###-#### format, there's no reason to assume a particular number is a telephone number. You might also be interested in Key exchange, which details the mathematics of cryptography. Specifically, two parties are interested in verifying that they know the same number, but neither wants to say what that number is, in case the other party "shouldn't" know. Often, this is accomplished via an asymmetric algorithm, exchanging a different number called a public key. Either party can only verify their authorization by knowing both the public information and the private information. Nimur (talk) 17:46, 6 December 2009 (UTC)