Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2012 July 25

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

July 25

Glowsticks

Is there a name for people who gather in deserts at night that dance around with glowsticks while wearing hoodies? Americanfreedom (talk) 01:52, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately the current Reference desk policy is that the first response to a question should not be humorous, so I'm just going to have to restrain myself. Looie496 (talk) 02:27, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Try Psychonauts. Ditch ∝ 02:50, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Burning Man may have some relevent information for the OP. --Jayron32 05:05, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Goddam hippies. μηδείς (talk) 05:58, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

"Raver" is closest. --Viennese Waltz 09:57, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Resolved

Shadowjams (talk) 09:40, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Dunmore War

I need a page that tells me the names of men who were in the Dunmore's War. More specifically the Muster Rolls for Ohio.Moseleysr (talk) 04:01, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

According to what little I know about Dunmore's War, and according to our article about it, the combatants are Native American tribes and the colony of Virginia. "Ohio" was, in 1774, not yet any definable political entity -- the "Ohio Country" was a place name -- and so it's not clear to me, even if soldiers did muster from the area now known as "Ohio", what kind of muster rolls you're expecting to find. Can you clarify a little what you're looking for? Jwrosenzweig (talk) 05:02, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

this book is used as a reference for the WIkipedia article on Dunmore's War; being titled "Documentary History of Dunmore's War". The table of contents looks like it has Muster Rolls. I haven't looked deeper, but it looks quite like that is what you want. --Jayron32 05:12, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Here are online lists including those from that book. Rmhermen (talk) 15:28, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Cheapest Vacation Destinations in the Southwestern United States?

Which vacation destinations in the southwestern U.S. have a lot of stuff in them but are relatively cheap, besides the Grand Canyon? Futurist110 (talk) 07:31, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Las Vegas can be quite cheap if you go during the week, provided you don't actually gamble. Casinos will give you cheap rooms and buffets in the hopes that you will gamble. In addition to all the Vegas sites, there's Hoover Dam nearby.

Colorado ski resorts are also cheap off-season, and the mountains are still worth seeing, year round.

If a road trip is your style, the trip from Denver to Las Vegas (on I-70 and I-15) is rather dramatic, changing from mountains to deserts and everything in between (you also drive through the northwest corner of Arizona, which has some impressive eroded rocks, and Utah, which has buttes). You could drive it in 12 hours, nonstop, but you'll probably want to take 3 or 4 days so you can stop and view the sites. StuRat (talk) 10:03, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

So, combining these suggestions, you could fly into Denver, rent a car, drive to a nice ski resort, stay there overnight, drive to some place in Utah, stay there, then drive on to Vegas, and stay there before returning the rental car and flying home. Try to time it so the entire vacation is on weekdays, so you will get lower rates. One caution, though, driving through the mountains takes guts. I had white knuckles on a few occasions. StuRat (talk) 10:20, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

• It would be easier to answer this question if you could clarify what you mean by "stuff". Things to see, things to do, or what? Looie496 (talk) 15:59, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Family favorites include Petrified Forest National Park, Joshua Tree National Park and Havasu Falls. μηδείς (talk) 19:57, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Atheist/nonreligious Arabs

Are there any atheist/nonreligious Arabs? If so, how many? --108.206.7.65 (talk) 17:28, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

See Arab_people#Religion. The proportion varies heavily by country, but there may be several million Arab Christians. Generally speaking, Jewish "Arabs" consider themselves, and are often considered by other Arabs, to be a different race. Someguy1221 (talk) 17:55, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I think you have answered a different question than the one that was asked. There are of course atheist Arabs, but getting a count would be difficult, because they are frequently discriminated against -- see Discrimination against atheists#Islamic countries. Looie496 (talk) 18:01, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I did! I got so into reading about the religion of Arab peoples that I forgot the original question. Sorry, OP. But looking more, if you look at any of our articles such as Religion in Iraq, "atheists" are actually completely absent. The only exception I found is in Lebanon, where 5% are atheists. I'm sure they exist in the other countries, they are just so few they don't even show up in surveys, or they're afraid to admit it. Someguy1221 (talk) 18:07, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

We have this article: Demographics of atheism, but Arab countries specifically are not discussed, rather lumped in with other, more broad geographic regions. I am having trouble finding sources with even rough estimates of the number of atheists in Arab countries. See the short "Religious Affiliation" passage in this book for a possible explanation as to why there might not be a verifiable answer to your question. Ditch ∝ 18:53, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

As the article I linked above points out, the majority of Islamic countries officially impose the death penalty for "apostasy", which means changing from Islam to atheism. The penalty is generally not enforced in its full rigor, but it provides a pretty obvious reason why most atheists in those countries would not go public about it. Looie496 (talk) 19:16, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

It also depends on how the data was collected. Any source going by official government records won't list atheists for most Arab nations, as some legally require each citizen to declare a religion. That's also mentioned in the link Looie gave. Someguy1221 (talk) 19:31, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

The answers above seem to ignore the fact that there are lots of atheist Arabs that don't live in Arabic countries such as Khalid Duran, Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan. 203.27.72.5 (talk) 21:42, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

By atheist Arab, you seem to mean atheist ex-Muslim, no? μηδείς (talk) 22:37, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

That assumption would seem to mean that Arabs are synonymous with Muslims, and that isn't true in either formulation. There are several million Arabic people who aren't Muslim (and are not recent converts away from Islam, as noted above with the Arabic Christian people), and there are several hundred million Muslims that aren't Arabic. --Jayron32 23:03, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

No, my statement is based on the understanding that the three people mentioned were all raised Muslim and are hence, as I said, ex-Muslims. I congratulate you on misunderstanding that. μηδείς (talk) 23:12, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

They also all have the letter "a" in their name. What's your point? --Tango (talk) 23:26, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

That Khalid Duran, Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan are atheist ex-Muslims known for their critiques of Islam, and that nobody gives a fuck if they are of Arab as opposed to, say, Pakistani descent? Hope that's not unclear after the third saying. μηδείς (talk) 01:01, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

(EC) I think μηδείς is trying to say the people shouldn't be considered Arab for some reason. I don't think it's a particularly good point. I haven't looked in to the three examples but I presume those people potentially self identify as Arabs or at least would often be identified by others as Arabs. Salman Rushdie was also raised a Muslim but is now atheist, I don't think he's commonly called an atheist Arab and doubt anyone here planned to do that. Similarly there must be Arabs who were raised as Christians who are now atheist and even those who were raised as atheists. Nil Einne (talk) 01:09, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Looking in to the cases, Ibn Warraq was born in Pakistan. Wafa Sultan was born to an Alawite family in Syria. Khalid Duran's article doesn't comment and I won't use external sources for BLP reasons although the article does give their name in Arabic. So μηδείς has a point that one example is likely a poor example. I'm guessing 203 was confused by the fact Ibn Warraq sounds like an Arabic name, but that's probably because it's a pen name (with a fair amount if history). It does seem to me there was a much better way to make the point that one of the example was flawed, starting with WP:AGF that the IP understood the difference between someone being Muslim and someone being an Arab but was somehow mistaken perhaps because they were going by other things like the names. N.B. For BLP reasons, I've attempted to avoid any speculation of specific people on my part concentrating on what's in the article/s. Nil Einne (talk) 01:17, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Ibn Warraq is an Arabic name, so I incorrectly assumed that he was an Arab. Alawi is a religious group, not an ethnic one. I'm pretty sure that Wafa Sultan is an Arab, but maybe I'm wrong. I was also assuming that Khalid Duran is an Arab based on his name being Arabic, but looking at an external source I think actually has one Arabic parent and one European. I have no idea how he identifies. I deliberately excluded atheists who were formerly Muslim who I knew weren't Arabic like Salman Rushdie. 203.27.72.5 (talk) 02:13, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Nil and 203 for your reasoned responses. No, I meant exactly what I said, that I thought 203 might have meant to say that they were atheist ex-Mulsims, instead of atheist Arabs. It seems I was wrong, but then it also seems I took account of that possibility by using the verb seem and asking a question, didn't I, rather than making the absurd positive claim Jayron32 chose to read where it wasn't written? μηδείς (talk) 02:23, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

The obvious elephant in the room is that declaring one'self atheist in many Arab countries would be a serious crime, so many atheists, or those who might be atheist had they lived somewhere else, don't declare it and are thus hard to define. Sort of like when Ahmadinejad declared there are no gays in Iran. I think it will be incredibly difficult to find statistics on the number of atheists in those nations, also depending on how you define atheist (do people have to be outwardly atheist, or do you care about what they actually think?). Shadowjams (talk) 03:50, 26 July 2012 (UTC)

Help with editing signature

I am unsure if this is the right place, but I have nowhere to turn. I've been trying to change my signature now for several months and no matter how I input it, it tells me it is invalid. But everything is correctly coded and closed off. And it keeps telling me it's an invalid, raw signature. Anyone able to help? _{MusicFreak7676} ^TALK! 21:27, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Have you tried WP:VPT? That would seem like the place for this. I would just give them the error message as well as the sig you are trying to add, bracketed by <nowiki></nowiki>. Should also probably tell them whether you checked the "wikimarkup" box. Someguy1221 (talk) 21:32, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I will try that. I have everything marked up and all it tells me is that it's an invalid signature but does not tell me which part of invalid. _{MusicFreak7676} ^TALK! 21:34, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

It's more likely that MusicFreak is doing something wrong than that there is a technical problem with the software. The best place to ask about this is Wikipedia:Help desk. When you ask for help there, it will save time if you avoid vague descriptions like "it tells me it is invalid", and instead describe the specific actions you performed and the exact wording of the error message you received. Looie496 (talk) 21:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Where specifically should I go so I don't ask the same thing over and over again? And all I'm doing it copy/pasting the code I've written out, pressing "Save" and it tells me it's invalid. But won't tell me how. _{MusicFreak7676} ^TALK! 21:38, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Go see my comments over at VPT. If you still get an error, copy paste the error message you are getting. Someguy1221 (talk) 21:41, 25 July 2012 (UTC)