Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2011 September 8

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September 8

Hauntings

I am trying to identify a "demon" in a house haunting that a little girl cals the "muddymud"? Any info will be very helpful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 207.255.1.42 (talk) 15:46, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Can you give some context here? Are you referring to some actual event that you are involved with (in which case I don't see why the word should mean anything), or to some fictional portrayal? Looie496 (talk) 15:49, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

[1] Beeblebrox (talk) 18:16, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Since the little girl apparently invented the character, I would think the character's identity is "muddymud". thx1138 (talk) 18:17, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Late Gmail Delivery

I got a mail with my assignment attached from my professor today. The deadline was 8th September =( . When I looked, it showed that he'd sent the mail on the 29th of August. Why did it take gmail 11 days to forward my mail? Is this something common? Now I've gone and missed the deadline. =/ 223.177.133.240 (talk) 16:40, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure it's actually Gmail that caused the delay? Inspecting the Received lines in the Email headers can often tell you where an email message got stuck. Unilynx (talk) 17:41, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

In Gmail, "show details" only reveals four lines of "from / to / date / subject", and even that is not raw data from the original header. To see the actual header, click on the triangle in the upper right corner of the message panel to pull down a window and then select "show original". -- 110.49.240.103 (talk) 20:46, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

What is the dry-wipe marker ink solvent?

Is it usually alcohol, or what?  Card Zero  (talk) 17:26, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Yea, alcohol. You can smell it.

Couldn't tell you the concentration, but WikiHow claims it's over 90% Isopropyl . [2]

APL (talk) 22:19, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Optimum proportion of income spent on rent?

Refdeskers, I enlist you in settling, or even intensifying a pub argument. The question is what proportion of an adult urbanite's income should be spent on rent. The stipulations are basically that the person has normal costs and desires in a normal city, specifically:

• Earns anything from minimum wage/unemployment benefit (£200/$300 or so a week for the sake of argument) to high-end professional salary (£150k/$230k per annum)
• Does not have any major costs outside own usual consumption needs and wants, i.e. no dependents, no expensive medical treatments, and lives within their means (e.g. no major debt)
• Living in a city of a few hundred thousand in population with no unusual cost pressures on rents upwards (e.g. Venice for space, Moscow for foreigners) or downwards (e.g. Detroit for dereliction, Manhattan for rent control).

After some back and forth, and insults as to who was overspending and who was being cheap, the figure of one third emerged as consensus. Does this accord with your understanding?

I'd be interested in hearing the economic angle on the topic (i.e. do the poor spend proportionately more on rent?), as well as your own personal experiences and observations. Obviously, a question as broad as this invites answers chockful of caveats and protestations of total subjectivity, so let's skip that if possible. Thanks in advance, Skomorokh 20:53, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Hmm, not sure I can find a source to back this up, but the standard advice for renters is indeed to try to spend no more than one-third of your monthly income. Beeblebrox (talk) 20:58, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

You could try playing with this rent calculator. Supposedly if you fill in all the fields it will tell you how much rent you can afford. Beeblebrox (talk) 21:00, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Affordable housing says that housing is often labelled "affordable" when it costs no more than 30% of the household's monthly gross income. Dragons flight (talk) 22:11, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

The traditional rule of thumb in the United States is that an appropriate rent is about 25% of gross income. (See here.) While many people spend 30%, this is considered higher than advisable. The standard advice for the United States might be a bit low for countries where car ownership is not a near necessity. If you don't have a car, it might be fair to spend 25% of your income plus £250 (my estimate of the monthly cost of car ownership somewhat corroborated by this thread) minus the cost of your monthly transit pass. Marco polo (talk) 22:58, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

You might be interested in reading Round About a Pound a Week, which looked into this question (among others) in the very early 1900s, in London, but only for the 'respectable poor' earning (as the title says) 'round about a pound a week', which obviously wasn't great wealth but also wasn't the poorest. It found that child mortality was lower in households that spent more on rent, even if it led to buying less food (and none of them had enough food, really) and poorer quality food. Housing was the basic culprit in the illness and death of thousands, and it was better to feed your children less in a more expensive room. Child survival rate correlated to rent, not income. While it is certainly the case that, since then, a lot of the slum housing unfit for human habitation has been destroyed in Britain, replaced with council housing, it still remains the case that the cheapest housing (including the worst council housing) often has chronic problems with damp and mould. The poorest children in the UK have much higher rates of illness and breathing problems, often attributed largely to their housing. Poor Kids [3] is an eye-opening documentary.

I hope this hasn't been too off-topic, but I think people can underestimate how big a deal this is at the low end. Everyone knows there's a minimum standard of food you need, no matter what percent of your income, but people can forget there's a minimum housing standard too. So, I guess I'm saying that the general rule might be 30% or something, but that won't apply at the minimum-wage end. 86.163.0.200 (talk) 17:13, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Looking at it from the POV of trying to maximize long-term wealth, I see two distinct categories:

1) People who rent are basically flushing that money down the toilet, as they will never get it back. These people should pay as little in rent as possible. Obviously, not so little that they endanger their health, as medical bills will quickly surpass the saved rent. Also, if the lower rent requires them to live where other expenses are higher, like transportation or replacing items constantly stolen by thieves, then that must be considered, too.

2) People with a mortgage, if on a property expected to appreciate nicely in value, may want to maximize the amount they pay each month. This will allow them to pay it off quicker, pay less interest, and realize the full gain when they sell it. Of course, they don't want to pay such a high percentage of their income that they would default on payments if anything goes wrong, like a health issue and/or losing their job. StuRat (talk) 17:30, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

People on the minimum wage in South East England can easily be spending 60 per cent of income on rent. A few months ago we had a thread when people were complaining that the relatively low rents paid by tenants of social housing in the UK were subsidised by taxes of others. Those rents would be more likely to amount to 25 to 30 per cent of a minimum wage income. Itsmejudith (talk) 19:03, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Toilet Coordination

Is this a known phenomenon? As in, just like it is said that two female friends (especially those living together) will develop a pattern in their monthly periods that will exactly match each other, is it possible that two guys, having completely different eating/drinking cycles will develop a pattern by which they both choose to go to the toilet at exactly the same time? (I do not mean to equate periods with toilet duties - I do have valid reasons for suspecting this phenomenon may exist). --KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 22:32, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

There is some doubt as to the existence of menstrual synchrony, but if it does exist, it probably has a pheromonic or chronobiological basis. Synchrony in eating/drinking and toilet habits will have more to do with the fact that two people living together will usually eat at the same time and have access to the same amount/kind of food (i.e. merging of Eating habits) and will probably have nothing to do with the former. Also see Biorhythm, which is considered a pseudoscience.-- Obsidi♠n Soul 00:37, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Of course, but I did specify people with "completely different eating/drinking cycles". Cheers, though. KägeTorä - (影虎) (TALK) 01:16, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

This link has some insight into the practice. --Jayron32 04:25, 9 September 2011 (UTC)