Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 April 14

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April 14

Kelmscott School London Information

Could you please check information about Kelmscott School in London,UK? It looks like someone has edited it with very disturbing information. Thanks — Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.31.62.149 (talk) 17:20, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you for reporting the vandalism to Kelmscott School. I have reverted it and warned the perpetrator. --ColinFine (talk) 18:01, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Can DEA reschedule drugs at will?

Per the Controlled Substances Act, can the DEA re-schedule different drugs at will without congressional approval? Hence, if the DEA chooses to re-schedule marijuana as a Schedule 5 drug, is there anyone to prevent them from doing so? Acceptable (talk) 17:52, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Basically, yes, although, if I understand right, Congress could override the DEA if it wanted. Pfly (talk) 05:47, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

The Canadian Cross of Sacrifice

I came across our Cross of Sacrifice article, and found U.S. Installations which says; "There is a Cross of Sacrifice located in Arlington National Cemetery by the graves of United States citizens who enlisted in the Canadian military, and lost their lives during the First World War. Proposed in 1925 by Canadian Prime Minister MacKenzie King, it was in part due to Canada entering the war long before the United States, and many Americans enlisting in Canada to join the fighting in Europe... The inscription on the cross reaffirms the sentiment expressed by Prime Minister King regarding Americans who served in the Canadian Forces." The text seems to mostly have been pasted directly from the Arlington National Cemetery website. Two questions; what exactly is the inscription and what exactly were the sentiments of Mckenzie King? Half an hour of Googling has failed to solve the mystery. Secondly - would Canadians really call their premier "Prime Minister King"? In the UK, we would say, "the Prime Minister, Mr King" or "the Prime Minister, MacKenzie King" instead. Alansplodge (talk) 18:54, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

I would think Prime Minister MacKenzie King but I have probably learned that from Canadian TV. Rmhermen (talk) 00:32, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

To the second question there is Prime Minister King and again. There is also Prime Minister Diefenbaker. Finally the prime ministers site has Prime Minister Harper. If you look through the speech a bit he calls the Minister of Defence by his full name Peter MacKay, the mayor of Inuvik as Mayor Lindsay, the premier of the Northwest Territories as Premier Roland and John Diefenbaker as Prime Minister Diefenbaker. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 07:10, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm not positive but most sites seem to say something like "The inscription on the cross reaffirms the sentiment expressed by Prime Minister King regarding Americans who served in the Canadian Armed Forces. Following World War II and the Korean War, similar inscriptions on other faces of the monument were dedicated to the Americans who served in those conflicts which may indicate that the inscription is that seen here. CambridgeBayWeather (talk) 07:19, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I found that too; however it's more a statement of fact than an expression of sentiment. I wondered if there was something more lyrical on the other side. Thanks for the info on addressing Canadian PMs, I suppose that they fall in between the US and UK styles. Alansplodge (talk) 09:17, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

The right panel of The first row right-most image reads: "Erected by the government of Canada in honour of the citizens of the United States who served in the Canadian Army and gave their lives in the Great War 1914 † 1918" Dru of Id (talk) 18:53, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, but I have that bit. What does "the sentiment expressed by Prime Minister King" mean? Alansplodge (talk) 20:29, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm coming to the conclusion that I ought to excise the reference to MacKenzie King's sentiments and stick to the facts that we have. Thanks everybody. Alansplodge (talk) 22:26, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Isn't "Mackenzie King" treated as a dual last name? It's like "David Lloyd George". We do call him simply "King" as well, but it seems much more usual to me to use both names. Adam Bishop (talk) 01:24, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

Oh, I thought it was a middle name. Does anybody know for certain? Alansplodge (talk) 17:40, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

A couple of his letters look like they're signed WL Mackenzie King.[1][2][3] The Canadian Encyclopedia bio[4] refers to him at one point as "Mackenzie King". (Lyon appears to be his middle name, as is customary with politicians.) Clarityfiend (talk) 19:41, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm going to vote in the opposite direction, on the grounds that if his surname was "Mackenzie King" you would expect that his brother would also be a ""Mackenzie King", however this doesn't seem to be the case; see Dougall MacDougall "Max" King. I believe that having your mother's maiden surname as a middle name was not uncommon in Victorian times, two examples that I can think of are Woodrow Wilson, whose mother was Jessie Janet Woodrow, also Thomas Stearns Eliot whose mother was Charlotte Champe Stearns. In Mackenzie's case, it looks as though his parents wished to emphasise the link to William Lyon Mackenzie, but didn't continue in that vein with his younger brother. I cordially invite any interested parties to continue this conversation at Talk:William Lyon Mackenzie King, from whence I rather lazily copied and pasted this. Alansplodge (talk) 21:00, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

In similar fashion, almost nobody would look for pre-ennoblement David Lloyd George under "George, David Lloyd". He was always referred to as "Mr Lloyd George", not "Mr George". But his family surname was George, not Lloyd George. His wife was Mrs Lloyd George, but his daughter was plain Megan George. See Talk:David Lloyd George#His pre-peerage surname. -- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 21:30, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Although our article suggests that he added his uncle's surname to his as a sort of political nom de plume, so not exactly the same. I took the liberty of correcting your link to the talk page. Alansplodge (talk) 23:07, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

New Party

I am having problems with the New Party (United States) article. I have problems using hyperlink sources from KeyWiki.org or Barack Obama and The Enemies Within book. Notability the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism inside the New Party that the Committees of Correspondence was radically left (Marxist-Leninist). The users on New Party (United States) are trying to cancel my account for no good reason. After all, Keywiki.org is also a wiki.

http://www.amazon.com/Barack-Enemies-Within-Trevor-Loudon/dp/0615490743 www.cc-ds.org/

Renegadeviking

Those may not be reliable sources, per the edit comments in the article. You should raise the question on the article's talk page. Don't engage in an edit war. RudolfRed (talk) 20:14, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

And discussing on the talk page does not mean inserting the full text of a Communist Party document from 1975. It means explaining briefly what you want to do and why you want to do it. Looie496 (talk) 20:17, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

Getting rid of narrow/thin white lines in maps

If you look really carefully at this map (http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/pdf/territory/pagetacq3.pdf) and similar other maps, this map has narrow/thin white lines running though some parts of it. What is the best free way to get rid of these narrow/thin white lines in Linux while still preserving all of the colors on this map and the high quality of this map? Thank you very much. Futurist110 (talk) 23:11, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

It's an artifact of the way the pdf file is set up internally. I think the image data is divided into rectangular chunks, and they aren't being welded together perfectly. If you look at it with a different pdf viewer, it will look different. Not necessarily perfect, but different. Looie496 (talk) 00:36, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Would it be a good way to convert this file into another file format (such as jpg, svg, et cetera) and then convert it back to pdf format? If so, which file format should I convert it to? As for different pdf viewers, which other pdf viewers besides Document Viewer are available for free and can be used in Linux? Futurist110 (talk) 00:52, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

The chunks are actually totally fine in the original files (they do exist as part of the vector format). But the PDF viewer makes a few "guesses" about how to scale them when rendering them, and guesses wrong. So they show up as hairline white lines. Converting it to a raster format (with, say, Photoshop or Gimp) ought to be OK, though. (PNG ought to be ideal.) Converting it to another vector format (e.g. SVG) will preserve, rather than fix, the underlying issue. But you should be aware it is really just an issue with how it is displaying on the screen, not an issue with printing or rasterizing. --Mr.98 (talk) 02:09, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Thank you very much. I am looking for a free way to fix it, and I do want it to be fixed on my computer screen as well, rather than merely when I am printing it. That said, I appear to have found a great free PDF converter here (http://docupub.com/pdfconvert/). Thank you very much for your advice about the PNG format being ideal, since I don't know much about all of the image formats out there. Futurist110 (talk) 03:03, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

I agree with previous responses, and note that the white lines appear to move when I zoom in and out, with my PDF viewer. That's a sure sign they aren't part of the actual image, but just artifacts created by the viewer. StuRat (talk) 17:55, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Is everyone here sure that PNG is the best format for converting this map from PDF in order to get rid of these thin white lines? Futurist110 (talk) 22:57, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

PNG would be the best non-vector image format choice. I’d say the ideal solution would be to merge the chunks so they are one path, eliminating the possibility for them to have gaps altogether. This can be done in Inkscape. Even more ideal than that would be to regenerate them from the original data in a more render-reliable (or vector oriented) fashion, but that would likely be even more work. ¦ Reisio (talk) 23:45, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

"I’d say the ideal solution would be to merge the chunks so they are one path, eliminating the possibility for them to have gaps altogether."--Does anyone have any advice on how to do this? I'm not very good at using Inkscape, so yeah. However, I do want to point out that converting this picture and similar pictures to PNG format appears to have achieved my desired outcome, so thank you very much for this advice. Futurist110 (talk) 02:31, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

It typically involves opening the file, ungrouping most everything, manually selecting every chunk that belongs together, and telling the application to combine them (from the Edit menu, IIRC). Unfortunately part of what makes the way such files were already created suboptimal is that just opening them and editing them can be quite a tedious ordeal on ordinary consumer hardware, because instead of a single path with a single boundary of vectors for the computer to calculate and keep in memory, exponentially more boundaries must be dealt with. ¦ Reisio (talk) 08:36, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

It's a huge amount of work if you aren't already familiar with vector editing programs. Converting it to a PNG is much easier. I believe GIM can import PDF files and convert them to raster images. --Mr.98 (talk) 00:31, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

It’s a lot of work even if you are familiar. ¦ Reisio (talk) 01:04, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

How do these two U.S. National Atlas maps look now that I converted them to PNG? Futurist110 (talk) 07:45, 18 April 2013 (UTC)