Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2015 August 11

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August 11

Ticker symbol being unrelated to the company name

Apparently later this year the GOOG symbol will be used by a company called "Alphabet"[1]. Has there been any other notable examples of this? I.e. a company named ABC trading under the symbol XYZ where the two names are unrelated? My other car is a cadr (talk) 03:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

I think US Steel is X. Probably. --Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 03:31, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

From the WP article ticker symbol:

"Symbols are sometimes reused, in the US the single letter symbols are particularly sought after as vanity symbols. For example, since Mar 2008 Visa Inc. has used the symbol V that had previously been used by Vivendi which had delisted and given up the symbol." -- Paulscrawl

Better example from same WP article, ticker symbol:

"AT&T's ticker symbol is simply "T"; accordingly, the company is referred to simply as "Telephone" on Wall Street (the T symbol is so well known that when the company was purchased by SBC, it took the AT&T name, capitalizing on its history and keeping the desired single letter symbol)." -- Paulscrawl (talk) 03:52, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

V is related to Visa and T is related to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. I'm asking about unrelated names. My other car is a cadr (talk) 05:19, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

I think this is more complicated than you suggest. I'm fairly sure AT&T isn't an initialism any more [2]. In other words, neither T in AT&T stand for telephone. If the T in their symbol stands for telephone, not the T in AT&T (which doesn't stand for anything), then it seems fair to say the symbol is actually unrelated to the modern name. Edit: You could perhaps say it's related in the sense the T in AT&T originally came from telephone, and the T in their stock symbol represents telephone, but clearly it's complicated.

Anyway, other more obvious examples from the article would be:

Belgian brewer InBev, the brewer of Budweiser beer, uses "BUD" as its three-letter ticker for American Depository Receipts, symbolizing its premier product in the United States. Its rival, Molson Coors Brewing Company, uses a similarly beer-related symbol, "TAP

There may be a B (and a U) in InBev (actually Anheuser-Busch InBev), but it's quite difficult to argue it has anything to do with the B or U in Anheuser-Busch InBev, when if you read about Anheuser-Busch and Budweiser, the Budweiser name came from the place, not the person. It's even more nonsense to argue the a or p in Molson Coors Brewing Company came from the company's name.

Another example would be

Tricon Global, owner of KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, adopted the symbol "YUM" to represent its corporate mission when the company was spun out of PepsiCo in 1997. In 2002, the company changed its name to match its symbol, adopting the name Yum! Brands.

where the symbol may be related to the name now, but it wasn't when the symbol was chosen. There may be a u in Tricon Global Restaurants, Inc, but it seems a real stretch to argue it came from the name.

Third example would be:

LUV - Southwest Airlines (after their main hub at Love Field)

Again, it seems a real stretch to argue the L in LUV is connected to the l in Airlines.

There's also the examples from a number of Asian countries were numbers are used. Some of them may have some connection to the name, but some surely don't.

I'm fairly sure that there are also companies who have kept a ticker symbol in at least one stock market after a merger, but their company name doesn't include any part of the old company name (a subsidiary may); although I admit though I can't think of any off hand.

Nil Einne (talk) 13:08, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Ah found one merger example [3] suggests and World Fuel Services and [4] seem to confirm that World Fuel Services Corporation uses the symbol INT, from one of the merger partners, International Recovery. BTW, it's easily possible this example is even more extreme than Google/Alphabet. I'm not sure if World Fuel Services still uses the International Recovery name any where any more. (If they do, I'm sure there are some cases where the name isn't used.)

Incidently, I should mention I'm sure there are also examples like Google where a company renamed itself after internal restructuring (rather than external mergers or splits) but kept the old ticker symbol in at least one market despite their new company name not having any part of what the ticker symbol originates from. And again, I'm also sure there are cases where the old name wasn't actually used for any products or divisions.

Nil Einne (talk) 13:22, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

See if NASDAQ's Symbol Change History helps you answer your question. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 05:33, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

It depends what you mean by "unrelated" (after all, Alphabet will still be the holding corporation for Google), but there are some fun ones. First Majestic Silver is AG (like the chemical symbol for silver), AngloGold Ashanti is AU, and CHC Group (a helicopter manufacturer) have HELI. It also seems to be done for banks that have large numbers of branches. Something called Lehman ABS Corporation has a number of unrelated ticker symbols (CVB, JBJ, JBK, JZJ, XVG) for reasons that aren't clear to me, and similarly, Nuveen Investments uses what seem to be random letter combinations beginning with J for their different branches (JPW is Nuveen Flexible Investment Inc, JTP is Nuveen Quality Preferred, etc). Smurrayinchester 07:39, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

U.S. Steel is definitely X, I checked. It's the company that's so important that replace the "US Steel" on its logo with "Steelers" and that's the Pittsburgh Steelers logo (the most US football championships of any team). When they tried to stop the Great Depression from happening the first stock they semi-ceremoniously propped up was U.S. Steel. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 13:10, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Cleopatra's Nose

Hi, so I've been looking at the Cleopatra's nose problem by Pascall, but I can't actually find why the world would have changed if Cleopatra's nose had been shorter? Uhlan ^talk 04:39, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• Desires decide destiny. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 05:09, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• The straightforward interpretation is that, if her nose (perhaps her most striking feature) had been shorter, Mark Antony might not have fallen in love with her, and therefore wouldn't have started the Final War of the Roman Republic that created the Caesars and the Roman Empire. An alternative explanation is given here, which refers to physiognomy (the belief that the shape of your face determines your personality): if Cleopatra had had a shorter nose, she would have been a less bold leader and therefore the Roman civil war might never have happened. Either way, it's the equivalent of what would now be called the butterfly effect - a tiny change causes ripples that affect history in large, unforeseen ways. Smurrayinchester 07:54, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• Interesting. It's like asking, what if Hitler had been during his artistic youth, a talented, successful painter? Would another equivalent-dictator have taken his place and influence, and lead Europe and the world to the same direction? The question is, isn't it the whole situation and context that calls for the next Hitler or the next Cleopatra anyway? Isn't it so that if Cleopatra's nose had been different, then it would have been something else that would have served as a pretext to the same following of the global situation and context? Akseli9 (talk) 08:34, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• See Great Man theory. You're asking a significant philosophy-of-history question, and people on opposite sides of the not-so-active-anymore debate will produce opposite answers. Nyttend (talk) 03:58, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Corruption of Minors

A discussion on Wikipedia lead me to this law in Pennsylvania regarding "corruption of minors". I won't ask anyone to bore themselves reading it, but it basically covers a whole host of things you can't do with minors, like help them break the law or give them guns. What is strange to me though, is this part: "whoever...by any act corrupts or tends to corrupt the morals of any minor...commits a misdemeanor of the first degree." Multiple Pennsylvania cases have upheld this aspect of the law, and this just strikes me as bizarrely unconstitutionally vague. Now, I'm not asking for any debate regarding this law, but I'm curious as to the history of the wording in this law, "corrupts the morals". Is this an artifact of a time when that phrase had an understood meaning? I'm not sure if it's simply referring to sex, since Pennsylvania has an entire separate statute for statutory rape, though perhaps this law predates that one. I don't know, I'm just curious if "corrupts the morals" ever meant something beyond, "whatever the state decides it means at any given moment." Someguy1221 (talk) 05:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

How do you figure it's unconstitutional? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:16, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Void for vagueness is the relevant article. Sjö (talk) 06:48, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

If a given law has never been successfully challenged in court, it remains effectively constitutional. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:05, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

And vague definitions don't only give the state wiggle room, they also give it to the defendant. It's up to both to try to convince the trial judge and jury of their interpretation. Then sometimes the court of appeal. Then the Supreme. The more it happens, the more precedent is set for both sides to pick and choose from, and the "heinous" and "depraved" cycle contines. If law were always clear and simple, we wouldn't need lawyers. InedibleHulk (talk) 13:30, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

(ec)In our article Minor (law) the first prevalent themes are Gambling and Alcohol. The link between "Alcohol" and "Corruption" seems quite obvious. With "vagueness" too, for one who has ever experimented the effects of the abuse the day after. Of course, nowadays sociology, psychology, and neurosciences give us a better, wider, much more detailed perspective of the various possible cases arising of all the different possible situations, and this could be used for helping lawmakers straighten the picture even more, note however the use of the term "consternation" by ECOSOC in Convention on Psychotropic Substances. The answer even then was indeed "broader", not "narrower". --Askedonty (talk) 06:51, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Someguy1221, run a CTRL+F search for "In deciding what conduct" in the opinion of the Superior Court of Pennsylvania in the case of Commonwealth v. Decker. Also consult the concurring opinion in another Superior Court case, which quotes a Supreme Court's ruling on the scope of the provision, especially as it relates to a previous version of the text. You may finally be interested in these comments from a Centre County legal defence firm; given their location, they focus more than others on this provision's relationship to alcohol-related offences. I was digging into this topic myself some months ago, and as far as I can tell, this is the closest Pennsylvania gets to a provision that specifically prohibits adults from helping minors commit crimes; I couldn't find anything in the Pennsylvania Statutes (whether through its search feature or through Google searches on related topics) that's comparable to the Ohio concept of contributing to the delinquency of a child. Nyttend (talk) 04:16, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Blackest country on earth?

Is South Sudan the blackest country on earth, in terms of skin color? Is Iceland the whitest country in terms of skin colour? --Hiyahiyaford (talk) 09:49, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

It depends on the colour scheme used in the atlas you're looking at. That's the only place where the "colour of a country" has any real meaning. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 09:59, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

In terms of skin color rather than atlas ink, do you give more weight to blacker blacks and whiter whites, or do you just want to divvy everyone up into two equal piles? Do albino negroids count as black or white? What about mongoloids? And are you talking sheer numbers or percentage of population? In any case, a Google for "country with largest black population" seems to have Nigeria, Brazil and the United States as the consensus top. "Country with largest white population" seems to be the the United States, Russia and the Isle of Man. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:21, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Isle of Man??? Akseli9 (talk) 10:35, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Percentage-wise. Maybe. The sources I glanced over were mostly forum types. Not the most reliable. InedibleHulk (talk) 10:53, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Von Luschan's chromatic scale has a map of skin colors that might give you a general idea. I don't know how accurate it is, though. Sjö (talk) 12:24, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Even if it was spot-on, the world has certainly changed since "pre-1940". But yeah, still a good find for a general idea. The lion's share of that change (assuming "native population" meant then what I think it does now) was in Jack's cartographical colours. The UN can't control the sun and clouds (allegedly). InedibleHulk (talk) 13:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Come on guys, don't be such. OP just meant the country where you see the most only Black people everywhere you go, and the country where you see the most only White people everywhere you go. Now if it is a bad or incorrect of forbidden or whatever question for any reason, just state it and mask it if needed. Akseli9 (talk) 10:39, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

It's a fine question, just a bit ambiguous. Sudanese blacks are generally quite black, while Nigerians are browner, overall. If you put a million lighter blacks in some magical melanin blender, and ten thousand darker blacks in another, you'll get a darker concoction from the one with fewer "black people". InedibleHulk (talk) 10:53, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

According to Demographics of Haiti, 95% black, and the other 5% also contains mulattos. Demographics of Iceland says 93% Icelandic, which certainly suggests white, and 7% "other", possibly also suggesting white. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:10, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

"Mulatto" is such a vague, location-dependent term that statistics using it seem virtually valueless; for our purposes something like the Fitzpatrick scale or Von Luschan's chromatic scale seem more likely to be useful. Wnt (talk) 16:24, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

That's the CIA for you. It likes intelligence, but mystery, too. Wikipedia believes in Mulatto Haitians. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:25, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Here are some pictures of the (alleged) blackest people on Earth. These are more nations than states, though. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:16, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

As far as this world goes, "The Ugandan Giant" was also billed from "Deepest, Darkest Africa", and "The Celtic Warrior" has also been fairly accurately described as "The Human Jar of Mayonnaise". Seriously though, Uganda is a top contender, and Ireland might beat Iceland, depending on whether the "others" are like the Others. InedibleHulk (talk) 12:11, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

There is a simple map in the skin color article - I think from the description page it covers native residents from pre-1940, so it may be out of date for other purposes. To my eyes it looks like most of the darkest skin color is actually a little north of the Equator, in the more arid terrain at the fringe of the Sahara where people are more steadily exposed to sunlight. Wnt (talk) 14:08, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Sidetrack over the rainbow

I am surprised no one has mentioned the blurplest country on earth. μηδείς (talk) 18:43, 11 August 2015 (UTC) I don't get it. InedibleHulk (talk) 18:53, 11 August 2015 (UTC) neologistic portmanteau e.g. ---Sluzzelin talk 19:02, 11 August 2015 (UTC) I mean, I don't get it. Your bluelink makes sense, but the redlink links to a bunch of deletions between 2006 and 2010, calling them nonsense, but not specifying. Were they about skin colour? Haiti? Sunny Delight? Absolutely nothing? To paraphrase a famous black and white Hispanic, you've got some 'splaining to do, Medeis! InedibleHulk (talk) 19:13, 11 August 2015 (UTC) Googling "blurplest country on earth" finds exactly one result, and "it defies logic at this point." Now I'm even more confused. InedibleHulk (talk) 19:18, 11 August 2015 (UTC) Sorry, Inedible, I should never have brought it up among the uninitiated. But there is a certain line I will not cross. Feel free to hat. μηδείς (talk) 02:34, 12 August 2015 (UTC) As Otto Mann said of the unlabeled can, "Some things man is not meant to know." InedibleHulk (talk) 14:58, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

What was that book? Dark comedy involving the Rorschach Test

I recall once reading the first chapter of a novel-- or possibly the first story in a collection of short stories-- which centers around a character taking the Rorschach test. Their responses to each blot were listed, and all of them involved something sexual and often bizarre or paranoid content such as UFOs. The overall tone was that of black comedy. Anyone know what I'm talking about? 75.4.17.61 (talk) 18:29, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

If pre-1976, perhaps cited in book, The Rorschach test exemplified in classics of drama and fiction. -- Paulscrawl (talk) 20:36, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Flowers for Algernon? (and I still think Hermann Rorschach should be played by Brad Pitt, sooner rather than later) ---Sluzzelin talk 20:41, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Definitely. And I always thought that Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky should have been played by Donald Sutherland. Trouble is, DS is now 80, while PIT (not Brad) died at age 53. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:38, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Then have Kiefer do it. Explore PIT's secret life as a counterterrorism agent. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:56, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

William Shatner takes a Rorschach test, at about the 2 minute mark:[5] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 21:56, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Artist

On this drawing Sotheby's tentatively reads the artist's signature in the lower right corner as H. Helley. Google doesn't know him, so I also checked for H. Helly and H. Hilly, but nothing comes out. Any idea or is it some forgotten artist? Brandmeister^talk 20:41, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

• Conceivably Kelly? —Tamfang (talk) 22:50, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Promethean Society

Reading our article Geoffrey Trease, I noticed a mention of the Promethean Society, of which Hugh Gordon Porteus and Desmond Hawkins were also members. I would be interested to know more about the society. DuncanHill (talk) 21:47, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

I found The Promethean movement website which seems to be the same thing. Alansplodge (talk) 15:51, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Um, thanks but that looks nothing like it! I found a little in Andy Croft's biography of Randall Swingler [6] - "They took their social criticism from Shaw, Lawrence, Huxley and A. S. Neill...". DuncanHill (talk) 15:58, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

Apparently, the Promethean Society is not the Prometheus Society.—Wavelength (talk) 16:49, 12 August 2015 (UTC)

According to this book (Rewriting the Thirties, Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (eds), Routledge, 2014), the Promethean Society was "founded in 1931 as a result of an extraordinary correspondence about 'The Revolt of Youth' in the magazine Everyman", and "took their social criticism from Shaw, Lawrence and Huxley, [and] their politics from Lenin, Trotsky and Ghandi". Editions of Twentieth Century (no "The", according to most sources) are available from various antiquarian booksellers. The modern Prometheans appear to be an Objectivist alternative to Freemasonry - it takes all sorts... Tevildo (talk) 20:53, 12 August 2015 (UTC)