Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 August 11

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August 11

how or where do I go to find out the price value of an antique?

The searches I have done have not been helpful. I do not want eBay. I am looking for a real person who can tell me about antiques and help me sell it if it is worth a lot. Antique dealers are not honest, are they? I need help to auction. I need an antique advisor person. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.121.39.164 (talk) 01:51, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I suggest you look at a guide to experts on various collectibles - one is by Dave Maloney and is likely at your local library. Collect (talk) 02:02, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

"A real person who can tell you about antiques" is likely to want to be paid for furthering your education. You can pay for a professional valuation. Auction houses do this regularly. If you fear you will be "low balled", then make sure the professional knows that you will not be selling through that firm. Then there is no conflict. You can also check the "Sold Lots" or "Past Auction" catalogues of the bigger houses, like Sotheby's or Christie's if your item has a name (like "Blue Boy" by Gainsborough) or specific type (sterling silver, Russian tea service). If you can describe the item to us, perhaps someone here has either information or a connection. Bielle (talk) 02:14, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Appraisals: If you want an honest appraisal be sure that the appraiser is neutral and is not interested in doing business with you. Professional appraisers who are not dealers are best, as are appraisers who work for notable auction houses. Avoid going to dealers. Many will give you a spiel such as "your vase is worth 100 dollars, can I buy it for 100 dollars?". They will usually turn it around for a big profit.

As for guide books.. antiques guides are only guides and nothing more, take them with a grain of salt. Two things to consider: antiques guides oftentimes give inflated values. Sometimes they list "asking prices" for items seen in stores (that may have sold for considerably less), or the price may be for a mint-condition object when yours is probably not in mint condition. Also note that the antiques market as a whole as well as specific genres of antiques fluctuate over time, so don't rely on a book more than a few years old.

If you want to do some research on your own, one very good site to check out is [1]. This site indexes live auction results for the past 8 years or so - it shows what has sold for how much and it covers many medium to high end auctions. You can sign up for free (no suprizes, spam or credit card required. You can sign up with fake info and they won't find out) Run a search for your item (date, maker, style, whatever's applicable) and see if anything is similar to what you have.

Lastly, are you willing to give out any specifics about the item you want to sell? If you want you can describe the item on here or email me in confidence and I will try to see what similar items have sold for and get back to you. ThemFromSpace 02:50, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

A gold color quarter

I have a gold collor U.S. quarter dollar, 2002 — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.54.90.170 (talk) 01:54, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Most likely a Sacajawea dollar and not a quarter. Collect (talk) 02:03, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

What question are you answering, Collect? Or is that just a comment on the OP's statement? -- Jack of Oz ^{[your turn]} 02:08, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

The Sacajawea dollar is almost exactly the size and weight of a US quarter, and is "gold colored". Other than it being a gold-plated quarter (heck - there are gold-plated everythings in this world) the most likely "real coin" the IP would have is that dollar coin - which frequently ends up being treated like a quarter by cashiers. Cheers. Collect (talk) 04:45, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Maybe he's a mind reader. You know... "ISP". I wonder, though, if there could have been some "limited edition" 2002 quarter that was gold-plated for some reason, it being during the time they were issuing the state quarters. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:33, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

There are scam outfits like The Franklin Mint, which do things such as putting a thin gold electroplate on a coin so they can sell it for 10X what it's worth (even with the electroplate). Could you have one of those ? StuRat (talk) 02:47, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Not just the Franklin Mint, either. When I googled [gold plated quarter], a number of entries came up - this, for one.[2] If the OP's unstated question is "what is it worth?", legally it's worth... 25 cents. Assuming it's not rejected for having been defaced. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:51, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Gold-plating a quarter is kind of the opposite of this old joke: Ole won an Olympic gold medal, and he was so proud of it, he had it bronzed. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:52, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I have also found a gold plated half dollar, a silver plated penny, and a gold plated penny. The US mint does not do this kind of plating. Googlemeister (talk) 16:39, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I found a "silver plated" cent in change, and later realized it was probably actually coated with mercury. We used to play with mercury in chemistry class, and I recall how easy it was to put a mirror-like mercury coating on a cent. Edison (talk) 20:21, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

How large is the Citywest Hotel, anyway?

List of largest hotels in the world has the Citywest Hotel in Dublin ranked at #61, with 1,714 rooms. However, the Citywest Hotel article only claims 774 rooms for the hotel. The hotel's own web site also claims only 774 rooms. On the other hand, this Irish Times article (excerpt only) claims that the hotel has 1,730 rooms. Does anyone know the reason for this significant discrepancy? --Metropolitan90 (talk) 02:51, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know the actual answer, but there may be some confusion between rooms which guests can book as a discrete entity (e.g. "Room 123"), rooms which guests can occupy exclusively (e.g. "Room 123: a suite with bedroom, sitting room and bathroom" [i.e. 3 rooms]), "rooms" meaning beds, of which there may be two or more in a room or suite, and rooms in total, including those that guests can use communally, such as bars and lounges, plus all the service rooms such as kitchens, machinery rooms, corridors, cleaning cupboards, etc, some of which may or may not be considered rooms depending on one's definition. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.201.110.129 (talk) 03:20, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Dots per inch and image quality

I have a digital camera which I want to use to take pictures which will be printed in a hard copy publication. Obviously I need the best possible image quality. At first I thought this could be achieved by changing the dots per inch setting on my camera, but then I found that I cannot change this setting, it is set to 72 dpi. Then I did a little reading around the subject and discovered that a dpi setting is not really what I need anyway, because that is something that is set when printing the images, not when taking them in the first place. The images need to be printed at 300 dpi and I understand that it does not really matter that my original digital photo is at 72 dpi. So what I am wondering is, how do I ensure when taking the photo that it will be of sufficiently high image resolution to look pin-sharp when printed at 300 dpi? The camera is a 12 megapixel camera but the only relevant setting I can see on the camera is to set the image size to the maximum. This I have done and the EXIF data of a sample image shows that the image is indeed 4000 x 3000 megapixels. But it seems to me that this is still not necessarily what I am looking for, since all it is doing is making sure that the image can be printed on a large size piece of paper such as A3. The section in our article on spatial resolution seems to be relevant – there is a good illustration there of how the pixel count can be higher but the image quality still lower. I guess I need to ensure that the spatial resolution is as high as possible. How do I do this? Thanks, --Viennese Waltz 08:31, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Simple answer: use a very good camera with a very good lens. You can buy a pretty cheap 14 megapixel-plus compact for example and get your resolution (DPI), but that doesn't mean the image is going to be good quality. You'll notice that most of the top of the range compacts have now settled at around 10-12 MP, as with the lenses and sensors they realistically can't handle more than this. Cheaper compacts with higher pixel counts are simply jamming in more pixels of junk, not making the picture any better (poor Spatial resolution in terms of that article). Go for a good DSLR with a high-end lens and it can handle considerably higher resolution at high-quality. But you've got to spend the dollars.
If you are stuck with one particular compact camera (and I'll assume this is probably the case given it generates a 4:3 aspect ratio image) generally I would suggest to set the image size to Large, and image quality to Fine or Superfine (depends on brand, model, etc, exactly what options it has, and in practise with Canon compacts I have found little to no difference between fine and superfine). Then shoot in as good as light as possible using the lowest ISO setting you possibly can (most compacts struggle at much beyond ISO 200; if possible shoot at 100). In general also get as close to your subject as feasible - i.e., don't stand back and zoom in if you can walk a bit a closer to the subject. There's some minor tweaks you can make depending on what controls your camera has, but at the end of the day you can't make your camera sensor or lens any better than it is, and as the saying goes, you get what you pay for. --jjron (talk) 08:46, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a really helpful answer. I'm stuck with a fairly low-end Canon Sony compact and as far as I can tell there is no setting for image quality fine or superfine, just the image size setting. (The manual implies that image quality correlates with image size.) But I will go with ISO 100 as you suggest. Since you seem pretty knowledgeable I'll ask another question. What is the deal with dpi? If I'm right that dpi is only something that you need to worry about at the printing stage, what does it actually mean that my camera shoots at 72 dpi? What is the relationship between dpi and pixel count? --Viennese Waltz 09:10, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) You can think of the sampling frequency (I prefer to use ppi, pixels per inch; in the trade we use dpi for different things) as determining the size of a ruler attached to the file; it’s not intrinsic to the photo itself. An image 4000 px × 3000 px will have a (nominal) resolution of at least 300 ppi as long as it’s reproduced no larger than 13.3" × 10". Unless we’re talking about art-book-quality printing, or aggressive JPEG compression has been used to reduce the file size, most images will be just fine at ~225 ppi or even a little less (therefore sized to a little over 17" × 13.3" in this case). Of course any cropping will reduce these dimensions. Good lighting & sensors reduce the effect of noise (speckly artefacts in shadows), which is usually a more noticeable problem than having slightly less than ideal resolution. Also important is the judicious use of sharpening, taking into account the intended size and the printing techniques that will be used. Avoid “digital zoom”: any upsampling that may be required should be done with an image editor.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 09:53, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Re OP's Qu2. What Odysseus says is right, but I'll put it in slightly different terms. In a sense you are right that DPI/PPI is only something you need to worry about when printing (I'll just refer to DPI henceforth to keep it simple). Some basic rules of thumb (and there are of course exceptions) are that the older style CRT monitors displayed at 72 DPI, while newer LCD monitors display at 96 DPI. This is why you can generally see more on an LCD screen than a CRT screen of the same physical size, although what you're looking at might seem a bit smaller. Also with more dots squeezed into every inch, the picture looks crisper and clearer.
This is fine for onscreen, however when you print it gives better quality with even more dots per inch - as Odysseus1479 says usually around 200 DPI will look fine on most printers, but if you're doing high quality prints, 300 DPI is standard. So your 4000 x 3000 image will look huge on screen and seem clear enough at that size - effectively 56" x 42" at 72 DPI, or 42" x 31" at 96 DPI. Now you could print at those DPIs, but print quality would be poor because printers need more dots per inch. If you printed at 200 DPI to get reasonable quality, it would only give you a 20" x 15" image, and 300 DPI this would be 13" x 10". In simple terms, you've only got so many 'dots' to use - the more of them you squeeze into every inch obviously means the image will be smaller.
Now your camera will generally record at 72 DPI because that was the old default monitor resolution and digital images are produced first and foremost to be viewed on screen. And if you're only going to view it onscreen then there's nothing really to be gained by using a higher pixel depth as the monitor won't show it. In the old days when bandwidth was far more of an issue on the internet it was also standard to have images at 72 DPI because it would look decent enough on screen but keep filesizes to a minimum - quite important on a tediously slow dial-up connection. But that's partly why images printed off the internet used to look either tiny or cruddy, or often both. To an extent this is still true, and you'll find in many recent programs such as PowerPoint and Adobe Acrobat an option to 'optimise' image sizes where you can choose whether to optimise for say web/screen or print. If you choose web or screen it will drop the image sizes to usually 96 DPI these days giving far smaller files, while print will leave them at higher quality so they look good when printed. Anyway, I'm probably starting to get off topic so will leave it there, but hope that makes some sense. Cheers, --jjron (talk) 14:30, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

As an aside, if you happen to know which Sony model you're using, and if you have some idea of what type of photography you're doing (indoor/outdoor? landscapes/sports/astrophotography/catalogs?) there are probably people here who will be able to offer some camera-specific and subject-specific advice...? TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:43, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Certainly. It's a Sony DSC-S980 and it is close-up work of book jackets and suchlike. But I think I'll be OK with the advice already given. Thanks all. --Viennese Waltz 14:46, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure you really want 300 DPI for book jackets. At that resolution you're likely to see specks of dust and stray eyelashes, which don't tend to make for an attractive pic. StuRat (talk) 18:52, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

That would certainly be a concern if you were to scan a book jacket at 300 dpi and print it life size—though one might hope that for a formal photo shoot you would take a great deal of care in cleaning your subject. One can print a photograph of a book jacket at 300 dpi and only two inches high, however (consider a book catalog, single-column book review, or similar application) in which case the presence of stray dust is probably moot. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 03:11, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I was assuming they meant to use the entire 4000 px × 3000 px resolution for a 13.3" × 10" image at 300 DPI. StuRat (talk) 05:07, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Well, you assumed wrong and TenOfAllTrades was right – I'm taking small photos of book jackets to illustrate reviews. --Viennese Waltz 08:10, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

If somebody else is putting together the hard copy publication, then you should simply take the biggest, sharpest picture you can, with the object of interest filling as much as possible of the frame, and let the person in charge figure out how to handle it. If you are the one putting it together, it would help to know what tools you are using. Looie496 (talk) 19:54, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I own a Pentax K-7 and a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50. As we live in the same city, I would have no problem lending the equipment to you. I also own a tripod, which may come in handy. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:30, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

OMG, I'm always wary to lend any piece of electronic equipment to any one (including friends, and specially, including family), but you want to lend your cameras to a complete stranger. Do you really believe in the good side of humankind? Quest09 (talk) 22:12, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Yes. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 16:17, 14 August 2011 (UTC)

canadian taxes

are canadian trusts incomes taxed by the canadian government and then by the us gov't?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jimex5 (talk • contribs) 16:26, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

If the Canadian trust has absolutely no involvement with the US (including via it's trustees) this seems rather unlikely Nil Einne (talk) 16:30, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Regardless of what Nil Einne says, I would not trust that at all, as we have no proof that he is qualified to advice you in this regard. You are going to have to contact an accountant or a tax lawyer who specializes in this stuff. Wikipedia editors are in no way qualified to give advice in this regard. You are, of course, free to read the articles Taxation in Canada, which has a section titled "international taxation" and Taxation in the United States. However, I'm not sure any information in those articles can help you. If this is not something you can figure out yourself, it is best to speak with a lisenced professional who has a fiduciary duty to give you good advice. No one here at Wikipedia has that responsibility, and so any information you MAY receive here should always be suspect. --Jayron32 16:32, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

And there are a lot of details missing in any case. I do know that US citizens get the privilege of paying federal income tax on all earnings, regardless of what country they earned the $ in, and that you can not renounce your citizenship if the US government thinks you are doing it simply to evade these overseas earnings taxes. Googlemeister (talk) 16:37, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

If you are referring to income trusts, you may be aware that there has been a controversy in Canada over their taxation, which our article addresses. You may also want to review the Convention Between Canada and the United States of America With Respect to Taxes on Income and Capital. You may particularly want to review Article XXIV of that treaty. Marco polo (talk) 17:48, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

You really need to talk to an accountant. There are lots of different kinds of "trusts" and not all of them are covered in international tax agreements. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 22:33, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Note that cases involving US citizens are clearly beyond the realms of what I was referring to which was a situation when no one or organisation involves has any involvement with/connection to the US. I can't see any reason why the US government would think they are entitled to tax an organisation and the people involved when there is absolutely no involvement with/connection to the US. (The US government may be accused of arrogance at times which I partially agree with but I've never known them to be so arrogant as to try and tax something when there is absolutely no involvement with/connection to the US.) And if they do, many people would just say screw them. The Canadian government is definitely not going to help them enforce any taxation. Of course if there is any connection to the US like one of the people involved (or a beneficiery or donor) is a US citizen or resident or the trust has shareholdings or properties or savings in the US this is a different matter and clearly not what I was referring to. (The US oddity of taxing its citizen even when they don't live in the US unlikely nearly every single other country in the world may be controversial but it at least makes sense as a possibility.)

Note also my primary point is the OP had not explained what situation they are referring to. I can't personally see any reason why the OP would automatically think there is going to be some tax in the US unless there is some US involvement. But the OP didn't actually mention there was. So I pointed out in some scenarios, i.e. in a situation when there is absolutely no connection to the US like I referred to, there is no reason there would be any tax due in the US (and Jayron32's claims aside, I'm still confident in what I said). In a more complicated situation where there is some connection to the US I agree it would probably be advisable for the OP to consult an expert since it's plausible there would be some tax due. However, if the OP wants any useful info, they need to actually provide some info on this connection. In other words, I feel the question is somewhat flawed as it starts of with an odd premise but doesn't explain why the premise may be true. (If it helps, replace the word 'US' with Malawi or Comoros or Bhutan or Tuvalu and perhaps my point will become clearer.)

Nil Einne (talk) 12:50, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Right, Nil Einne, so since you stand by your advice, are you prepared to go to Tax Court with this guy and stand side by side with him when its his ass on the line if you are wrong? No, your not. However, a licensed accountant or tax attorney IS, which is why we shouldn't give ANY advice where, if it is wrong, there is the real potential for real harm. --Jayron32 22:49, 12 August 2011 (UTC)

Zombie ants!

I used to find a web page containing rather creepy pictures of ants, other insects, and spiders killed by various fungi, similar to Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It even showed a spider whose whole body was covered in white fluffy fungus. But I can't find it any more. Does anyone know of a site with pictures of arthropods killed by fungi? JIP | Talk 20:00, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Do a google image search for insect fungus and then click on the link for the original website?!????????!?!?!?!!!?

Photos: "Zombie" Ants Found With New Mind-Control Fungi from National Geographic? Royor (talk) 22:49, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

I don't know what page you saw, but the term for this is entomopathogenic fungus; that might help in your searches, e.g. here: [3]. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:35, 15 August 2011 (UTC)

I swear I came across such a page in Bogleech before. I can't find it anymore though. They do still have a nice article on Zombie Snails and other friendly parasites of gruesome death.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 03:16, 16 August 2011 (UTC)