Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 June 29

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June 29

Question about Hondas

Are Hondas more popular than toyotas? Swancat (talk) 00:30, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

In a particular country? Or worldwide? Are you using sales to gauge popularity? Are you including commercial vehicles? Or just passenger cars? Would the Toyota Tacoma be included? You have to be more specific. Dismas|^(talk) 00:46, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

In cars, see who is the worlds number one automoblie manufacturer. In motorcycles and Scooters, see who has popular and attractive pricing in countries where cars are too expensive for many people. --Hans Haase (有问题吗) 10:37, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Connecting TV, Wii, and Receiver

I have a Nintendo Wii, an Onkyo HT R540 reciever, and a Samsung 4K TV (model: UN40JU6500FXZA). Right now, we can view the games we play on the Wii but not hear them. What cable do I need to be able to hear the output of the Wii? There is a manual for the receiver here. The TV manual is here. I think I need a digital audio cable such as this to go from the receiver to the TV but I'm not 100% sure. Could anyone confirm this? Thanks, Dismas|^(talk) 01:51, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Have you got a package of three coloured cables coming out of your Wii that connect into a converter for a SCART plug? like this? If so, I've had a similar problem in the past and addressed it by pushing the SCART cable in more firmly. See if that helps. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 09:01, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

I do not. I have those colored cables plugged into the back of the TV. Dismas|^(talk) 13:15, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Directly, into the coloured holes? Try switching for the Wii SCART adapter. Readily available on the interwebs in this country. Not sure if it'll work in the USA, as you have a different system for showing pix on your tellies or something, but it's a pretty cheap option for first try. IIRC, when I first set up my Wii, I tried doing it your way and I also had no sound. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 14:33, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Yes, directly. I can't tell from the image but I don't think the back of my TV has a connection that big! Dismas|^(talk) 14:50, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh! Judging by our article SCART, it was never that popular in the USA and is now obsolete. Over to the next wiseguy... --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 15:05, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Ok, so instead of having banks of RCA jacks your tv may have a weird many-to-one thingy. Look for "Connecting with a composite (A/V) cable" in the f*(cing un-page-numbered, frankly shitty manual. Now, there are at least 3 ways to get a Wii into a TV - A/V, Component video (which uses the same jacks), and HDMI. It sounds you have RCA jacks, not sure if three for old-fashioned or five for componen video. Anyway, if your TV has five colored RCA jacks, you should be able to plug in either 3 (old) or 5(newer,better component) plugs from the Wii (as directed in the manual) and that should carry all audio and video. If you have an HDMI cord, an adapter like this [1] should carry all video and audio into one socket. If you have the "One Connect Mini" model then you will need a 3-1 or 5-1 harness to plug all those RCAs into one jack. Said harness probably should have come with an expensive TV like that, but may well not. Here's the important part: you should not have to get an optical audio cable to hear the Wii if the TV and Wii are working properly. Audio and video should be able to be carried together, via HDMI, RCA A/V, or component video clusters. Hope that helps, SemanticMantis (talk) 17:15, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Thank you but you seem to be leaving out the receiver entirely. And in your defense, I guess I left a little out of my description. Right now the TV sound comes out of just the TV. Nothing comes out of the speakers attached to the receiver. What we would like is to have all the sound come out of the speakers attached to the receiver. With our old TV, which had different jacks and no HDMI, we had the receiver giving us surround sound for all the things, e.g. TV sound, Wii game noises, the DVD player, etc. Now the only sound we get is from the TV itself and nothing when using the Wii. Dismas|^(talk) 17:36, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

D'oh! I got the wrong idea from "we can view the games we play on the Wii but not hear them". Anyway, yes, there may be other ways too, but plugging an optical cable from TV to receiver as 71 suggests below should work. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:16, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

I think I understand the question. I have a different Samsung TV. It's got various things hooked up to it. On my TV, if you set the TV to "External speaker" in the audio settings, the TV outputs on its optical audio out whatever audio input it's getting. Connect that to an amp and you hear the audio. If your TV is like mine, then yes, just do what I did. --71.110.8.102 (talk) 17:40, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Wikipedia: Acronym & Wikipedia: Abbreviation

Please add a First Usage Date/Year Column to the Acronyms & Abbreviations Information. It would be very helpful if it could be sorted by this Column as well as the Implied Sort of (Acronym / Abbreviation) (alphabetically only) Column. This should be trivial if you use JavaScript, more difficult if you do not.

This is useful to provide at least Year information usage of Ancient - Modern Acronyms: AD, BC, RSVP, SVP and Technical Abbreviations: DEC, Laser, IBM, HP, SF (20th & 21st Centuries). Other questions: When was the Space Age? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markstrunk (talk • contribs) 19:10, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

The article Space Age considers it to have begun with Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957. AllBestFaith (talk) 23:12, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Suggestions about improvements to Wikipedia articles should be made at those articles' talk pages. I presume you want to visit Talk:Acronym and Talk:Abbreviation. But even better than visiting a talk page, you can fix it yourself. Here's the usual response on that: Thank you for your suggestion. When you believe an article needs improvement, please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki, so anyone can edit almost any article by simply following the edit this page link at the top.
The Wikipedia community encourages you to be bold in updating pages. Don't worry too much about making honest mistakes—they're likely to be found and corrected quickly. If you're not sure how editing works, check out how to edit a page, or use the sandbox to try out your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome. You don't even need to log in (although there are many reasons you might want to). --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 07:32, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

But bear in mind that information should only be added if it is backed up by reliable sources. I suspect that it is the exception rather than the rule to have a clear date when an acronym was first used - and conversely, there are often many bogus origin stories around. --ColinFine (talk) 10:01, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Getting Year of First Usage from acronyms and abbreviations

How to get Year/Date of First Usage from Wikipedia:Acronyms and Wikipedia:Abbreviations and Wikipedia:Dictionary? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Markstrunk (talk • contribs) 19:31, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

The Online Etymology Dictionary gives the earliest year for which there is a surviving record of a word. AllBestFaith (talk) 23:08, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Why do many foreigners underestimate distance in the US?

I've heard this. Maybe it's true. Presumably they've all seen a world map so shouldn't they know it's closer to think of "US"+"state" as "continent/Europe"+"country" than "countries they're used to"+"their provinces/prefectures etc."? (a few countries excepted but they're not the ones of those doing the underestimating in all probability) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:06, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Well, New Jersey is slightly larger than Wales, while Texas is about 8% larger than France. It's hard to compare two countries far apart visually. There are a few websites that let you overlay maps of various regions to see directly, but I lost the links when my computer crashed--someone here should know them. μηδείς (talk) 21:22, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

Seeing a map is one thing, but it takes experience to internalize that knowledge. I don't think it's weird at all to see e.g. Brit get a little confused their first time in California. You can't even drive from one end to the other in the same day! Me, I can't figure out how there can be any farmland left in England, that place is tiny ;) Here's a paper that studies how people estimate distance based on maps [2]. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:43, 29 June 2016 (UTC)

It doesn't take that long to drive from San Diego to Yuma. Oh, maybe you meant the other way. :p You can drive the length of the state in a day, though I probably wouldn't advise it. Google Maps quotes me about fifteen hours. (I'm Californian.) --71.110.8.102 (talk) 06:24, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I wonder what are the most remote two auto-accessible points in California from each other. I'm guessing you looked from the SE to NW corners, for example from Winterhaven, California to Pelican State Beach? Google Maps gives me 15 hours 13 minutes "without traffic", as though it were possible to find a time when you could do that trip without traffic, and says it's 1013 miles. --Trovatore (talk) 07:31, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Probably the same reason that just about everyone underestimates the size of Khazakstan and Mongolia, two of the largest countries in the world. And why people commonly overestimate the size of Israel, which is barely a spot on a globe. It's unfamiliarity, mostly. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 10:25, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

......or indeed don't know how to spell it. Ghmyrtle (talk) 10:33, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

♬ "In my country there is problem, and that problem is transport. It take very, very long because Kazakhstan is big"... (And then fake Kazakh song gets super racist very fast). Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 10:59, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

I suspect that the people who underestimate distances in the US are the same people who underestimate distances everywhere but map projection might have something to do with it.--Ykraps (talk) 11:23, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Why do many Americans habitually underestimate the competence of "foreigners"? (See also Ugly American). Formal surveys (e.g. the National Geographic Roper survey, 2002) consistently find that – on average – Americans' knowledge of geography ranks below their peers in developed countries.

Of course, the telling of 'stupid tourist' stories is far from being a U.S.-only pastime. I strongly suspect that amusing misconceptions by foreign visitors tend to be far more memorable (and prone to retelling and embellishment). Nobody sits around the pub saying "Did you hear about that sensible tourist who did a lot of research before his trip, planned a reasonable itinerary with appropriate time for travel, budgeted correctly for accommodation, politely interacted with the locals, and had no problems with our traffic rules or law enforcement?" It's just not an exciting narrative.

Relatedly, there's always the risk of mistaking anecdotes for representative samples. (As they say—the plural of anecdote is not data.) Suppose something were so incredibly foolish that only one in a million people would ever think to do it. Statistically speaking, there's more than 300 Americans lined up and waiting to embarrass themselves—and they are the ones who are going to get famous on the news. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 14:31, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

The difference between Britons and Americans is that Britons think 100 miles is a long distance, whereas Americans think 100 years is a long time. Iapetus (talk) 14:38, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Oh, I just love that. --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 14:55, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

One easy way to think of it is in terms of hours. Figure 2 hours for every 100 miles, and that will give a reasonable idea of the magnitude of the distance. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:31, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

That often doesn't work in the UK, because our towns are closer together than in most of the USA, so a higher proportion of any journey is going to be in built-up areas where the speed limit may be as low as 30mph, and/or in heavy (rush-hour) traffic. (There are 20mph limits in some town-centre residential and school-adjacent streets, but one wouldn't expect more than a couple of hundred yards of such in any one journey.)

I regularly drive between Southampton and Portsmouth or Gosport in Hampshire, and trips of roughly 20 miles take anything from 30m to 1h depending on particular starting points, routes, and the time of day: this is fairly typical in the UK. I have sometimes come close to a 50mph overall average when driving longer (>150-mile) distances mostly on motorways or good A-roads, but this is exceptional, depends on encountering no hold-ups (we have a lot of hold-ups) and requires pushing reasonable levels of endurance (and speed limits). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 17:45, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

The question seemed to be about the US. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baseball Bugs (talk • contribs) 18:20, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Of course it was, but it was also about foreigners' false perceptions of driving times in the US. The description of UK conditions was to illustrate that UK (and by implication, Western European) average speeds are generally lower, which will likely skew UK drivers' estimations of drive times in the US. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 13:18, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

My own take is, first, that the United States is a very large country. Only two countries are larger, and only one country, Russia, is significantly larger. Americans may not realize how much smaller other countries are than theirs, and other people may not realize just how big the United States is. Second, while the United States is the third most populous country in the world, that is because of its size, not its population density, and it is a moderately populated country, while most people are from more densely populated countries. (Less densely populated countries than the United States don't have that many people, although two sparsely populated Anglophone countries, Canada and Australia, are huge.) I think it is mostly a matter of imposing one's own view of where one lives on the rest of the world. As the original poster said, the United States is better compared not to a country in Europe, but to the continent of Europe, and countries in Europe are better compared not to the United States but to states of the United States. (Historians can come up with ideas as to why most of North America consists of two large countries while Europe consists of many smaller countries. I didn't come here to discuss European history, although it interests me.) Robert McClenon (talk) 18:38, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

The North American analogy to the many nations of Europe would be the many nations of Native Americans, all of whom were conquered by the invading armies of the European settlers. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 22:49, 30 June 2016 (UTC)

Firstly, I'm pretty sure the United States of America had as much, if not more, to do with the conquering of Native Americans than any European country; secondly the nations of Europe are entirely independent of one another, so I'm not convinced that that is a good analogy at all. Nor is it one that was called for: The OPs question related to confusion over the size of America and its individual states which I suspect is due in part to the method used to transpose a spherical world onto a flat map. This has the effect of distorting the landmasses so that those near the equator appear smaller and those nearer the poles appear larger. I expect there are a few Americans who think Alaska is about the same size as Brazil.--Ykraps (talk) 15:34, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Notice I said European settlers. That's what the USA was made from. More to the point, English-ancestry settlers. Hence we all speak English. If the Roman Empire had managed to keep together, most of Europe would probably be speaking Latin. As to the maps, relying on a Mercator Projection would obviously distort. But if you're looking at individual countries, you would probably use the scale of miles / kilometers on those countries' maps to judge distances. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:23, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Also, Brazil is about 5 times the size of Alaska. But Alaska is about 8 times the size of Great Britain. It could be interesting to see a list of US states and European nations side-by-side to see which ones match closely in terms of square miles / kilometers. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:27, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

The average state is closest to Belarus (over 0.9 Belaruses of land area). The median state is closest to Greece (almost 1.1 Greeces worth of land). England is about 0.6 Londons short of beating Greece and is smaller than 56% of US states. (62% if lakes, rivers etc. count). The UK or Cold War Germany (the West) isn't really that much bigger than Kansas, an average state. Communist Germany was about the size of Tennessee. Italy has as much land as Arizona. Spain is 1.2 Californias. Portugal, 1500s superpower, is smaller than Indiana, one of the smallest states. (only 9 toy-sized states (~Wales or Cornwall) keep it out of the bottom 3). Texas is actually about 25% larger than European France, as France doesn't like to do colonies and counts French Guiana, Polynesia etc. as integral parts of their territory. Poland's between Arizona and New Mexico. Czechoslovakia (two countries) was smaller than Alabama. Millions of people have died because of lands that are now in ex-Yugoslavia that put together are only the size of Oregon (not much bigger than Kansas, either). Romania is barely bigger than Kansas. Ukraine is freaking huge by European standards. 0.8 Texases. Only European Russia's bigger at 0.4 USes (0.5 contiguous US'es). The European USSR was the size of 2/3rds of Lower 48. Count the entire Eastern Bloc and you get.. 2/3rds of the "upper 49". Throw in the 95% of Kazakhstan that's Asian and you finally reach the size of the US. I thought Central Asia was freaking huge... only half the size of the Lower 48. USSR minus Siberia... about the size of the US. And this. Holy shit, Australia's awesome. The Lower 48's still bigger. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 23:19, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

I imagine that people coming from nations with similar long distances, like Canada, or even longer distances, like Russia, wouldn't underestimate distances. It's just a matter of what you are used to. I have seen similar problems with underestimating the weather. An interesting example of this is my grandmother, who, despite living in cold areas earlier in her life, had retired to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and, when visiting Michigan at Christmas, wore a skirt and heels, and no coat, stepping off the plane. We had to find a blanket to wrap around her. StuRat (talk) 17:19, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Yes, you get acclimated. Like one of my Indian colleagues who got used to Midwestern weather and would wear short sleeves on visits home when everyone else was in jackets. Another Indian colleague once said that when asked how to describe America, he would answer, "Everything is big!" India itself is about twice the size of Alaska, but as densely populated as it is, it might not feel all that large compared with the wide open spaces of America. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:50, 1 July 2016 (UTC)

Also, most people in India probably don't regularly travel from one end to the other, so they don't even have an appreciation for how large their own nation is, much less the US. So, people would have to be wealthy enough to travel, and live in a nation with a large area, to be used to traveling long distances within a nation. StuRat (talk) 00:10, 2 July 2016 (UTC)

I'm not an American and I don't think I've ever underestimated the size of the US. In fact, I don't understand how all you Americans can squeeze into such a tiny country. But then, I'm Canadian. :) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Matt Deres (talk • contribs) 20:48, 2 July 2016

I once had a conversation with a Canadian lady, on a train maybe? going past a factory or something. I said I didn't understand her objection to the development, given that there was so much Canada. She said there really wasn't so much usable Canada. She said she wouldn't care if they built the thing in the North. --Trovatore (talk) 22:13, 2 July 2016 (UTC)