Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 August 1

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August 1

service records

hello im victor apodaca jr., i service in the national guards the late 80s im tring to get my service records so i could aply for my beenfits i service in hanford, california i cant remember the unit can you please let me know how to get them

victor apodaca jr sp/4 2926 heres my email victorapodac

Victor, I've removed your email address because it may attract unwanted attention on this public site. Any useful answers will appear here anyway so your email is not required. Richard Avery (talk) 06:11, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

You can apply for your service record here. StuRat (talk) 15:37, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Hanford, California appears to contain a California National Guard recruiting post, is that where you served ? I don't have a unit number, but their address and phone number are listed here. StuRat (talk) 15:43, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Prefecture ethnic composition in PRC

When I get information about ethnic composition of prefecture in PRC/ Especially prefectures of Heilongjiang, Jilin, Yunnan, Liaoning, Guizhou and Sichuan.--Kaiyr (talk) 12:48, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

You can find all the answers you seek at List of Chinese administrative divisions by ethnic group. --Jayron32 19:21, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I want by prefecture.--Kaiyr (talk) 21:16, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Ah, sorry. Everything you listed was a province; but you want data for each of the individual prefectures of each province? Have you tried Chinese Wikipedia instead of here? They are likely to have more complete data than the English language Wikipedia. I don't read Chinese, so I can't help you research there, but if you do you may find it more useful than here. There are also other online Chinese encyclopedias as well; perhaps one of them could help. --Jayron32 21:31, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

But I dont know chinese.--Kaiyr (talk) 07:43, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

How to connect continents

How all the continents can be connected on road and through sea? That will be the future development in civil Engineering. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 14.96.223.107 (talk) 13:24, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

In fact, Earth consists of just 4 contiguous continental landmasses: Afro-Eurasia, the Americas, Australia, and Antarctica. Europe and Africa are both connected to the Asian landmass. There are already roads connecting Europe and Africa to Asia. This large landmass contains a large majority of Earth's population. Likewise, North and South America are connected by the Isthmus of Panama. At present, no road connects the two continents. It would be rather expensive and dangerous to build a road connecting the two continents through the Darién Gap, but there is no real engineering challenge to doing so. However, a Bering Strait crossing, connecting the Afro-Eurasia landmass to the Americas, would pose engineering challenges. Furthermore, thousands of kilometers of roads would have to be built across very thinly populated areas of Alaska and Siberia to connect any such crossing to the road networks of the continents on either side. The expense of such a link would be vast. The expense of connecting Australia via a series of very long bridges and/or tunnels via New Guinea and the Indonesian islands to Asia would be even greater. Probably even more expensive would be a link between uninhabited Antarctica and South America, its closest continental neighbor. It is hard to imagine justifying the expense of building these links when sea and air links are so much more cost effective. Marco polo (talk) 15:25, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

(edit conflict) You best shot for an intercontinental bridge between Eurasia and The Americas would be across the Bering Strait. That covers 5 of the seven major continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa share a land connection, as do North and South America). You'd have to string together a whole bunch of bridges across the islands of Indonesia before crossing Timor Sea to get to Australia. For Antarctica, your shortest bridge would be across the Drake Passage. --Jayron32 15:28, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

(ec) You'd want to put them well under the surface, to protect them from hurricanes and such. Anchoring them at the bottom might only work in shallow areas. When the water is several miles deep, you'd need to have free floating tunnels. If the combo of building materials and trapped air can be made to have the same density as the water, then the only forces they would need to resist are those of ocean currents. Hopefully they can be placed at depths where currents are minimal. You'd want to have sections divided by airlocks, so that a catastrophic failure would only kill those in that section. The airlocks would also be a natural place for restaurants, rest stops and motels. Internal combustion engines would not work due to the oxygen requirements and exhaust created; you'd need all electrical vehicles. You could allow individual vehicles, but an automated system of vehicles might make more sense, something like a subway system. StuRat (talk) 15:30, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Do you mean, can all the continents on earth be connected by roads across seas? If so, I don't think it would technically be feasible to build a bridge e.g. from Canada to Iceland or from Brazil to Sierra Leone, due to such factors as the depth of the ocean requiring innumerable massive pillars of several thousand feet each and, to put it mildly, challenging complexities involving waves, water pressure and continental shelf structures. For perspective, China this year completed the construction of the world's longest bridge over water [1], which is just 26 miles long as compared with the 1738 miles required to bridge Brazil and West Africa at the Atlantic Ocean's narrowest point. Furthermore, that bridge was built in relatively shallow water over Jiaozhou Bay but the Atlantic Ocean has depths of up to 13000 feet. Deserter1 15:49, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Just wait awhile... Ghmyrtle (talk) 19:49, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I wonder which will happen first, the Bering Strait crossing or the bridging of the Darién Gap. It it amazing that in this day and age it is not possible to drive from North America to South America. -- 203.82.93.120 (talk) 13:21, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Given the constant instability of the sea, ships and airplanes seem like much more cost-effective and much safer options. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 00:16, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

If an economic need existed to bridge the Darien Gap by road, it would most likely already have been done as there isn't any major engineering challenges to building that bit of road, only economic and political challenges. Googlemeister (talk) 21:11, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Anonymous prisoners

What happens when someone is arrested, has no identification on their person, refuses to divulge their identity, and fingerprints and DNA fail to produce a match ? Are they tried and convicted as "John Doe" and imprisoned to serve out their sentence as such ? Pick any jurisdiction you'd like. StuRat (talk) 15:56, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

In contrast to refusing, consider the case of amnesia. Presumably an identity search would be initiated, and there are plenty of possible sources besides fingerprints and DNA. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:24, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Sometimes an asylum seeker arrives in a European country with their identity documents deliberately destroyed. This is an attempt to prevent their return to another country within the Dublin Regulation. There have been a number of "orbiting" asylum seekers, who are shuttled from member state to member state. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 17:14, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

There was an interesting case recently in Utah. The person was kept in jail for some weeks until identified (matched to a missing person report), and then convicted to "time served" (30 days) and released. -- Vmenkov (talk) 00:13, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Not arrested - but the curious case of Andreas Grassl in the UK was similar. Alansplodge (talk) 21:39, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

I recall reading of a convict in Australia that was never identified. This was in a single-paragraph story in a "news from around the world in brief" type column in a UK broadsheet, maybe The Sunday Times from 2-3 years ago. My recollection is that a man of aboriginal descent was arrested (not sure what for) and refused to speak to any police/lawyers/judges, who weren't able to identify him through other means. He was processed, I believe, as "X", and served a sentence of around 60 days, refusing to give his name or state where he lived upon release. I have tried googling this, but can't find a reference anywhere, so I could be getting one or two of the details wrong (NB: I am not getting mixed up with "Mr X" in Israel, a high-security prisoner whose identity is thought to be known by Israeli officials but not released to the public [2]). Deserter1 10:59, 5 August 2011 (UTC)

Finding a gem cutter

Where, in the South-Eastern Michigan area, can I find a place to cut gems ? Specifically, I want one of the easiest cuts, a hemisphere shape, made out of the rod taken from a ruby laser. I tried Google, and found lots of ads for drills and saws impregnated with diamonds. I called the one jewelry store that came up, Tapper's, and they said they don't do that, and they didn't know of any places that cut gems for the public.

Alternatively, perhaps I could cut off the proper length of the rod and mail it to somebody to finish. What kind of tools are needed to cut through a ruby rod, without cracking it ? I could mail the entire rod, of course, but would prefer to limit the value of things I send through the mail. 68.79.93.3 (talk) 19:22, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

It would be surprising if you got much help with this, as people would suspect you were trying to pass off synthetic rubies as genuine. Whatever happened to those "diamonds", by the way? Looie496 (talk) 20:44, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I believe the ruby rods are genuine, or else they wouldn't work in lasers. They are lab-created, or course, so just like natural rubies, but without any inclusions or cracks. I suppose jewelers would probably find them objectionable, though, as large quantities of lab-created gems would undercut their prices. As for the diamonds, I haven't had them appraised yet. I was hoping to combine this chore with that one. 68.79.93.3 (talk) 21:00, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

I have no doubt that they're genuine, but synthetic rubies are not worth nearly as much as natural rubies. It may not be logical, but it's true. Looie496 (talk) 22:19, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I've concluded the same thing. That's why I'd like to cut them and give them away to friends, instead of trying to sell them. 68.79.93.3 (talk) 22:38, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

There don't seem to be a lot of custom gem cutters in the United States. If you search "gem cutter" in Google, you will find a number of results, some of them outside the United States. You could look for reviews and ship your ruby to the cutter of your choice and arrange for the cut ruby to be shipped back to you. The only cutter I found in Michigan during a (somewhat brief) search was this one, though he is on the other side of Michigan. Marco polo (talk) 00:00, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

OK, so it's not just my lack of Google-fu, there really aren't any gem cutters in my area? I'm surprised by that. 68.79.93.3 (talk) 01:17, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully the Michigan cutter is better at cutting than is his English in such a sentence as "A full recut, can loose as much as 50% or more of it's original weight depending on the severity of the damage." Cuddlyable3 (talk) 00:29, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

It looks as if gem cutting is one of those many useful crafts that generally don't pay a living wage any more in expensive places like the United States due to competition from low-wage places like India and Sri Lanka. So, I think most gem cutting is now done in Asia. It looks as if most gem cutters in the United States are hobbyists, though a few commercial custom cutters remain. Marco polo (talk) 14:02, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

Huh, I had long assumed that a lot of gem cutting was done in New York City's Diamond District, but perhaps I am mistaken. Our page says "An estimated 90% of diamonds in the United States enter through New York." So, they mostly reach New York already cut? Pfly (talk) 17:59, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

northern dancer, horse racing

I seem to remember that one of Northern Dancer's wins (perhaps even the 1964 Kentucky Derby) had some controversy attached. Though I'm almost certain, I can't seem to find any information anywhere. Am I wrong about my recollection? Thank You — Preceding unsigned comment added by 65.93.100.210 (talk) 22:04, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Did you read Kentucky Derby and Northern Dancer yet ? I didn't find any mention of a controversy in either. StuRat (talk) 22:25, 1 August 2011 (UTC)

Could you be thinking of Dancer's Image, the only winner ever disqualified from the Kentucky Derby, in 1968 ? StuRat (talk) 22:34, 1 August 2011 (UTC)