Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2024 January 5

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January 5

Geography questions

These questions are not homework. These came to my mind shortly before.

1. Why Australia does not have a major desert metropolis like the US has Las vegas and Phoenix?
2. Why the United States does not have any city propers with population over 10 million?
3. Why there are no countries in Europe over 100 million (other than Russia)?

--40bus (talk) 19:56, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I'll have a go, see below under the relevant headings. Adding note after I provided my answers: Very POV, very heart-on-your-sleeve, not for the faint of heart. You have been warned. --Ouro (blah blah) 07:26, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 1

Why should it, when it has all those lovely beaches? 31.113.52.197 (talk) 20:04, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Because it just doesn't. There weren't any drivers to establish it, being either natural (for a start, if You wanna live somewhere, you want to have a source of food; a riverbank is a good place to establish a city, as is a forest) or socio-economical (right situation or intersection of travel corridors). --Ouro (blah blah) 07:26, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

A desert isn't such a nice place to build big cities. The few big desert cities there are (Khartoum, Cairo, Baghdad, Las Vegas), are usually along a big river (Nile, Tigris, Colorado), providing the city with water for humans, camels, agriculture, ships and today hydro-electricity. Such big desert rivers need a big source of water out of the desert and a way to the sea through the desert. The wet parts of Australia are too small to feed such a river. How did Phoenix and Riyadh get so big then? I'll leave that question to you, but the circumstances must have been quite special. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:45, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

NB: Australia does have Alice Springs as a desert city. Pablothepenguin (talk) 15:57, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Phoenix, Arizona was originaly a farming community, depending on irrigation from the two large rivers that meet there. Las Vegas owes its origin to the peculiarities of the local gambling laws. Alansplodge (talk) 18:10, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

It's not that big even by Australian standards. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 19:56, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 2

Define "city propers". The City of London has a resident population of a few thousand but 40% of the U K's population live in the surrounding region. 31.113.52.197 (talk) 20:11, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

City proper is an administrative area of city. London city proper includes the entire Greater London.

--40bus (talk) 20:27, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I'd say that it doesn't have these because that't the way things turned out. The US is a vast place and for many intents and purposes can be defined as a body with fifty countries that differ quite broadly between each other. There are many nice, big cities to live in that offer opportunities for education, work, accommodation and food, and that's sufficient.

For some reason, the Americans didn't decide to merge their largest urban areas into cities with some sort of central government. The reason must be political. PiusImpavidus (talk) 11:53, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Because that would mean a loss of city government positions. If two cities become one, you go from two mayors (etc) to one. Who's going to be in favor of their own unemployment?--User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:06, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Assuming “Cities Proper” refers to the main city, New York City, and Los Angeles must come close. Pablothepenguin (talk) 15:59, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

See List of United States cities by population for more info. One factor is that large cities are often hemmed in by suburbs, which tends to keep the population of the central city relatively stable. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:09, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

I assume "city proper" means "within the legal city limits". --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 21:53, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

If you're asking why the largest city in a given state is not necessarily the capital, there are at least a couple of things to consider. One is that they tended to make capital cities roughly centrally located within the state, which not all big cities are. Another is that there were very few large cities in America originally. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:01, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Question 3

Does the 100 million include all of Russia, or is it only the European part? 31.113.52.197 (talk) 20:06, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Because their populations haven't grown enough, and are even declining nowadays. According to List of countries by past and projected future population, no major European country (except maybe transcontinental Turkey) is expected to be much closer to the 100 million mark in 2050 than it is today. --Theurgist (talk) 04:28, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

For one, that r country you named is not Europe. Yes, it's POV, and it's a good POV. Second, I'd say - too little space and too many wars. Europe, even if small, is home to very, very broad and diverse nations that throughout history have fought just too many times to gain that little speck of land to call 'theirs', thereby removing others in the process. Attempts to create a pan-European country (oh yes I'll mention the Romans and Napoleon) that would have a large population have and will fail because the people are just too different. --Ouro (blah blah) 07:26, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Europa has many small countries that kept each other balanced. In some cases, countries were even chopped up and turned into independent areas to keep anyone from getting too dominant. In other parts of the world, some countries managed to dominate and absorb their neighbours (sometimes European colonialism is to blame (North America, Indonesia), sometimes not (China)), giving very big countries with a lot of people. PiusImpavidus (talk) 12:18, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Another thing that will complicate this will be the real possibility of new European nations being formed, which will have small populations. Examples might include, Scotland, Kosovo, Catalonia. These are listed in order of how soon we might expect them to happen and how likely they are Pablothepenguin (talk) 16:07, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

Kosovo has already happened. Serbia being pissy about it is irrelevant. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:00, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

It's not exactly irrelevant, as it impedes Kosovo's aspired integration into the UN, the EU, and other organizations, blocked either by Serbia itself or by other parties unwilling to open Pandora's box by recognising a breakaway region. By contrast, no one had problems recognising Montenegro or South Sudan, nor will anyone question Bougainville's independence if Papua New Guinea ratifies it. --Theurgist (talk) 04:47, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

What do you call a ruler without units?

I was cleaning out my dad's place when I came upon an oddly marked ruler (this is it, though the picture is bad). Spoiler alert, they call it a mixing stick. If you need to combine fluids in particular ratios, but perhaps at different scales, you could use this baby. I guess. It seems like a niche need when you could just figure out the amounts for any given value pretty easily. So, Q1 is: would it be right to call this thing a ruler or is there a better term for it? The manufacturer calls it a mixing stick, but it clearly does more than stirring a mixture.
Second part: this thing has four scales on it and at first glance I thought they might be cm, inches, and two others, but they're not any scale that I can find. However, the four scales are interrelated in ratios. Scale A matches to Scale B in a ratio of 3:2. Scale B matches to Scale C in a ratio of 5:2, and Scale C matches to Scale D in a ratio of 3:5. (And Scale D matches to Scale A in a ratio of 4:9). This has turned out to be surprisingly helpful to me in drawing. I can measure a source image using Scale B, say, and easily scale an image up or down by moving to another scale. Seems like the kind of thing some other poor artist or draughtsman might make use of. Is this a tool that might be used in those circles under a different name? Matt Deres (talk) 21:13, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

Going by its name, a ruler is literally a device for ruling straight lines. It doesn't need units. HiLo48 (talk) 00:59, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

It's for mixing car paint isn't it? You put paint in your bucket up to a certain level, then the scale shows how far further up you need to fill the bucket with the pigment. So long as the bucket has a constant diameter all the way up it'll work and you don't need units. DuncanHill (talk) 01:48, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

I think your draughtsman would probably remain poor if he insisted on using the stick instead of a scale ruler. fiveby(zero) 02:29, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

A straightedge. DOR (ex-HK) (talk) 01:30, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Playing in Mecca

Mecca is a closed city so how do non-Muslims, such as Cristiano Ronaldo get to play there? CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 22:01, 5 January 2024 (UTC)

I can't find a solid reference, but it appears that the Mecca football stadium is outside of the area restricted to Muslim-only. RudolfRed (talk) 04:17, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

The religious prohibition applies to the inner city, the medieval holy city of Mecca, inside the inner of four ring roads. I don't know how far the prohibition by the governing authorities extends, but here is a map from a travel guide showing the "al Haram zone" with some checkpoints, and the King Abdulaziz Stadium is well outside that area and even well outside the outer ring road.  --Lambiam 08:03, 6 January 2024 (UTC)

How does Mecca enforce its rules? Do Muslims carry ID cards that say "I am Muslim"? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:28, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

See Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (Saudi Arabia), aka the Mutawa or 'Religious Police'. Mecca receives many pilgrims and tourists (Muslim and non-Muslim) from outside Saudi Arabia annually: anyone in the 'Muslim only' zone would be expected to carry identity documents with them, and the Mutawa are likely to challenge anyone who visibly acts in a 'non-Muslim' manner (see Hisbah) or visibly appears 'Non-Muslim'. (Doubtless not difficult to spot, in the same way that we residents of the UK find it easy to identify most tourists from the USA on sight, despite no 'racial' differences, through clothing and mannerisms – doubtless the reverse is also true.) {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.104.88 (talk) 13:59, 7 January 2024 (UTC)

Anecdote: I was walking down the streat in Tromso, Norway by myself. A woman stopped me and asked if I was American. I said that I was and asked he knew. She said that only American walk around with a stupid smile for no good reason. Then, she asked if she could practice Hollywood English with me since they only teach English English in schools there. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 14:39, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

This is one of my favorite special interest topics that I can’t stop talking about. When and how did Americans become famous for their smiling behavior in public, which much of the rest of the world reserves for private use only, between close friends and family? I’ve been discussing this for years and haven’t made much headway. There does seem to be some concordance that countries like Russia and China do not necessarily smile as much in public as Americans do, at least according to anecdotal reports. Further, when did people start smiling in photos? It is often said that the rise of dentistry in the US led to more smiling, but this is just something people often say, I have seen no evidence for it. Viriditas (talk) 17:02, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

As for the smiling in photos I understood that it arose after photography became easier. I was told that in the early days of photography taking a picture took some time to take and smiling that long was hard but a reliable source says something different. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 17:11, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Wider smiles were “associated with madness, lewdness, loudness, drunkenness, all sorts of states of being that were not particularly decorous". Yes, that’s the argument I’ve gravitated the most to, but it still doesn’t explain how Kodak and others managed to change the cultural acceptance of smiling in public in the US while making little headway elsewhere. Viriditas (talk) 17:24, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Look at the paragraphs beginning with the quote “Take the camera out of the professional and put it into the hands of the snapshot photographer and then they can do whatever they want”. It may be that in the Untied States cameras were cheaper than other countries combined with (stereotypical) more relaxed cultural norms. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 17:33, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

That is a great article. I was going to paraphrase a different Merrill Fabry article which says pretty much the same thing. All the reasons given are, to some small degree, correct. The main reason for the change is that there are a lot more photos, so there are a lot more photos of people smiling. As for why I was smiling in my anecdote, I was in Norway, which I enjoyed. I was very far north, which I enjoyed. All the graffiti I saw was in English, which I found very funny. It wasn't, as the woman I talked to aggressively suggested, that I was chest-height to all the women. 97.82.165.112 (talk) 17:28, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

I agree, but the main difference I still haven’t been able to get to the bottom of, is that there are still a lot of countries that culturally disapprove of smiling to or among strangers, reserving it solely for friends and family. If the wider embrace of photography and cameras as an accessible technology is thought to have changed this, then why do we still see bias against smiling in countries where cameras are easily accessible? Where I live, the Asian population is the majority, both in terms of residents and especially tourists. On the daily I practice smiling at random strangers. I’ve noticed that the German and Scandinavian tourists get frightened, and the Russians look positively angry. I admit, I sometimes forcefully smile at Russians, almost to the point of trolling them, and they have this bizarre reaction that almost no other culture I encounter even approaches. I did this yesterday at a family of Russian tourists, and they looked like they would have driven over me in a car if they were behind a wheel. Very odd. On the other hand, smiling at my fellow Americans on the street can and often does lead to random conversations and smiles in return. I’ve noticed that Korean tourists are far more open to it, but the Chinese and Japanese tourists don’t like it. I do have to be careful when I smile towards my fellow Filipinos, because, and this is no joke, that’s an easy way to get invited to dinner or to be introduced to their cousin who is looking to get married. For whatever reason, smiling goes a long way in their culture, but I have no idea why. I also found this to be true with people from Mexico, where a smile can lead to polite discussion and even a free drink. Viriditas (talk) 18:38, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

The issue has come up before on the reference desk: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2008 February 4 § When did people start smiling in photographs?; Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2021 December 12 § Very old pictures.  --Lambiam 10:07, 10 January 2024 (UTC)

Smile#Cultural differences has some treatment including Many people in the former Soviet Union area consider smiling at strangers in public to be unusual and even suspicious behavior,[9] or even a sign of stupidity.[10] and references but not much about the American proclivity. I read somewhere (not in this historical review, though) that I cannot remember that it comes with immigration. American cities were full of strangers with limited command of English. Hence, smiling demonstrates that one is not dangerous.

Another Aeon article says the US is a melting pot of Christianity, Stoicism, cognitive behavioural therapy, capitalism and Buddhism, all of which hold, to varying degrees, that we are responsible for our attitudes and, ultimately, for our happiness.

--Error (talk) 20:25, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Fascinating, and very helpful! Viriditas (talk) 20:51, 8 January 2024 (UTC)

Thanks all. CambridgeBayWeather (solidly non-human), Uqaqtuq (talk), Huliva 16:17, 7 January 2024 (UTC)