Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2019 July 29

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July 29

Northern border of Saudi Arabia

I noticed that under the Geography heading of our article Saudi Arabia (current version permalink), there are two maps with quite different versions of the border between Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Both maps come from Commons: [1][2]. In the first map, there is a "jagged" section in the middle of Saudi Arabia's northern border, with a segment of the border that runs north-south. In the second map, the border is smoother. There is no part shown as going north-south; it essentially runs westnorthwest-eastsoutheast. The jagged section in the first map is typically shown on maps from the twentieth century which include the diamond-shaped neutral zone, e.g. [3]. However, the map I linked to above, currently included in the Saudi Arabia article and entitled File:Saudi Arabia Topography.png, has the jagged section but not the neutral zone. Google Maps, for what that's worth, does not depict the jagged section in the border: [4]. My question is, why is the "jagged section" on older maps and some newer maps, but not in other newer maps? Does it have something to do with the elimination of the Saudi Arabian–Iraqi neutral zone? If so, why does that article not mention it? Similarly, our article Iraq–Saudi Arabia border does not mention what I've referred to as the "jagged section" of Saudi Arabia's northern border, and why it is not shown in most modern maps. Mathew5000 (talk) 01:09, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

It has apparently been historically unclear where the border actually is between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, with even maps published by national governments being inconsistent. The border was supposed to be set by this 1981 treaty between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, but apparently it did not have complete agreement from tribes living along the border, according to this document from the US state department, which includes both versions of the border. The treaty describes what the border is supposed to be and states that official maps have been drawn, but I cannot find them. The state department document refers to the jagged border as the "recognized border", and the straight version as the "de facto border", which is also apparently what the Saudi government uses when it publishes maps. Someguy1221 (talk) 09:42, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that the border has been inconsistently defined for almost a century. Besides the treaties you note, there is the Uqair Protocol of 1922 which (may have) had a different border, and the 1990-1991 Gulf War also complicated the situation. Part of the issue with the border is there isn't much of an impetus to nail it down; the near that border doesn't have much, if any population or natural resources (see, for example, maps in this article, which show no oil in that area). Given that there's not much (as yet) to be gained by resolving the border in that area, that may explain the inconsistencies in the maps. If oil were discovered near that line, however, I suspect there would be a greater impetus to sort it all out. --Jayron32 11:52, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

- could also be due to different satellite mapping systems - for example, WGS84 does not line up with GCJ02 - Epinoia (talk) 16:52, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

That would cause slight distortions in the direction and curvature of some lines, but would not cause a straight line to become jagged. Those kinds of distortions are on the order of meters or tens of meters, not the sort of thing that shows up like this. --Jayron32 18:07, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Thanks very much for the links to those documents, especially the 1986 CIA report: that explains it quite well although it's largely focused on the border within the former Neutral Zone. Mathew5000 (talk) 21:11, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

insula

what was the highest insula in Roman history?--87.27.156.88 (talk) 09:11, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Probably one just before it collapsed... AnonMoos (talk) 09:27, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

The Insula Felicles was famous for its height, e.g. [5], [6]. --Wrongfilter (talk) 09:39, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

WP:WHAAOE: 9 storeys, before Augustus introduced a height limit of 20 metres, according to a cited claim in Insula_(building)#Construction. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 09:52, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Stay fit at Insvla Ivpiter! Ninth floors from only 9 silvers a month! Rate table: 8th floor: 10 silvers 1 copper, 7th floor: 11 silvers 2 copper, 6th.. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 15:22, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

This seems pretty cheap. Gem fr (talk) 19:32, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Oh right, West Empire silvers were much smaller than Bible silvers, I forgot. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:14, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

USAAF in WWII

I've just been watching George Clooney's adaptation of Catch 22. I'm aware it's meant more as satire than a historical account, but I was wondering

• Did USAAF air crews in Europe during WWII have to fly a set number of missions before they were rotated out?
• If so, how many? and
• Could a local commander arbitrarily increase that number?

Rojomoke (talk) 18:32, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Here's an excellent source. Initially there was no rule, then variations were tried such as requiring one year of service or capping number of flying hours. A 30- or 25- (in special circumstances) mission rule was instituted in Nov 1942 in Africa and Dec 1942 in England; there was a different system in the Pacific - the entire doc is worth a read. Yes, individual commanders set the rules. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 19:08, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Gödel and food

I ve just read that Kurt Gödel had irracional fear of being poisoned and only ate what his wife prepared, to the point that he died when she became unable to cook for him. Why couldn,t he prepare his own food? 90.165.105.248 (talk)

Per our article, "In her absence, he refused to eat, eventually starving to death." That is, he couldn't because he refused to. The source is [7]. 70.67.193.176 (talk) 20:06, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

Well, yes, but the question remains of why he couldn't do it himself. The unfortunately pedestrian answer is that mental health is a complex subject and why people do irrational things is the subject of ongoing study by political scientists, psychologists and the like. But maybe there's a record of someone having suggested an alternate so we could at least hear his response? Matt Deres (talk) 20:20, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

The issue is whether he really couldn't or merely wouldn't. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:13, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

How did he eat before he married? DuncanHill (talk) 14:05, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

Very carefully. He wasn't born with full-blown paranoia; it developed as time went on.[8] Clarityfiend (talk) 19:33, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

His mother's food, I guess? Gem fr (talk) 19:39, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

• He wasn't lacking for food, he was distrustful of food. This had developed to the point of a psychosis, and logic had stopped being applicable to it. His fear was that his food was being poisoned, his remaining security was in his wife: part of hs psychosis was that food which passed through her hands was 'safe', but anything else wasn't. He wouldn't eat in restaurants either, even the commissary at the IAS. If he'd cooked for himself, the food still wouldn't have been 'made safe' by his wife, he'd just be poisoned by the food makers.

Even when younger he was an infamously faddy eater: one of the most plausible explanations is that he may have been a supertaster (as Aaron Swartz was). He was also prone to a variety of health worries and had pretty much no normal interest in food as a pleasure, merely an ascetic one in it as sustenance. In later years he seems to have taken to a diet of baby food, butter and laxatives (the chronic constipation involved might have been more effectively treated by eating something with some fibre, but that wasn't a widespread notion in the '50s). He also had a wide variety of general neuroses, stretching from spiritualism and ghosts through to a fear of refrigerators, stemming from Einstein's invention of an absorption refrigerator, to avoid the leakage risk of a toxic-filled refrigerator reliant on moving mechanical seals. Andy Dingley (talk) 22:44, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

The refrigerator thing is more rational than many people might think at first glance: a lot of early refrigerators used ammonia as the refrigerant, which could and did kill people if it leaked. Chlorofluorocarbons replaced it in domestic and commercial use because they're non-toxic (unfortunately, they happen to destroy the ozone layer, as we later discovered). (Of course, with any gas that is not oxygen, the gas can still asphyxiate if it displaces oxygen from an enclosed space, but I'm not sure household refrigerators contain enough refrigerant for this to be an issue.) Ammonia is still in wide use as an industrial refrigerant, because it's so efficient that it's worth the expense of leak detection equipment. Story time: my mother has a story that she saved her whole family as a baby because their refrigerator leaked refrigerant at night, and she started crying, which woke up the house and alerted them to the problem. This was the late 1940s in the U.S. She doesn't know if the refrigerator used ammonia. I thought by then it was mostly phased out in U.S. domestic refrigerators, but maybe not. Or, they might have had an old refrigerator (they weren't terribly wealthy). --47.146.63.87 (talk) 23:27, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

A few streets away from where I was a kid there was a large cold store (and ice cream factory). In the 1950s-1960s (I forget which) it had leaked and killed a couple of neighbours. Andy Dingley (talk) 23:30, 30 July 2019 (UTC)

How sad, but very “logical” despite the irrationality of it all. —/Mendaliv/^2¢/_Δ's/ 15:40, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. Something can be logical but untrue or nonsensical if based on false premises. Logic is only a formal means of connecting premises to conclusions, and something can be logically sound, but still false if the initial premise is not true. --Jayron32 15:43, 31 July 2019 (UTC)

aka GIGO Gem fr (talk) 22:17, 31 July 2019 (UTC)