Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2009 December 10

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December 10

Most Frequent Placename

I would like to collect a list of placenames that have been used as a name for a place and then reused as a name for another place. An example of what I mean would be Birmingham (UK) in the 'used' bracket and the insane number of Birminghams in the US in the 'reused' bracket. Can anyone think of some of the ones reused the most? This is not restricted to placenames of British origin, and any country/language will be counted (such as the huge number of Alexandrias and Romes). TIA! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 03:34, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Nah - only 16 Birminghams in the US. I believe Newtown with 17 is commonest in the UK (there are 19 in the US, and loads more elsewhere). But there are 38 Springfields in the US alone (lots more elsewhere) - so that probably wins in the USA (which is why they picked that name for The Simpsons). SteveBaker (talk) 04:08, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

(EC with above) I had always heard that if you include close varient spellings, the most common placename in the U.S. is Greenville, incl. Greeneville, which at my count has 36 occurances in the U.S. Another one would be Springfield, which may have a larger number of "sizable" cities (Illinois, Massachusetts, Oregon, Virginia, Missouri), and 38 total names in the U.S. Fairfield has many too. In the francophone world, Saint-Rémy shows up in a TON of communes, named for Saint Remigius, who was essentially the "St. Patrick" of France. --Jayron32 04:09, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

There are probably a lot of Washingtons in the USA (maybe not all that many in England). ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:16, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Washington (disambiguation) indicates 38 cities and 31 counties, to start with. There are also several mountains, and countless city streets named for ol' George. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:18, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Oddly - our List of the most common U.S. place names lists Clinton with just 29 - and Springfield getting credited with just 20?!? But our Springfield disambiguation page lists far more than that?!? I guess the list criterion is more restrictive or something. Weird.

Aha! We have List of popular place names - which appears to be a world-wide list. San José appears to be the clear winner with 1,716 places listed with that name!

...and The most common place name in America attempts to ask which place names appear in the most states (not quite the same question - but interesting). It says:

• "Riverside can be found in all but four states (it does not exist in Hawaii, Alaska, Louisiana, and Oklahoma)."
• "The runner up was Centerville in 45 states, followed by Fairview (43 states), Franklin (42), Midway (40), Fairfield (39), Pleasant Valley (39), Troy (39), Liberty (38), and Union (38)."
• "Springfield isn't even in the top ten (only 35 states have a Springfield)."

But this says: Franklin – 37, Salem – 36, Washington – 32, Springfield – 32. Clinton – 31. I don't know who to believe.

SteveBaker (talk) 04:33, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Some years ago I downloaded a copy of the freely available US Geographic Names Information System database, extracted a list of "populated places" not designated historical, and examined it for the most common ones. The results were numbers far larger than the ones given for US place names in this thread or at the Wikipedia list of common US place names (which is based on Census Bureau data). I presume this is because a large number of the "populated places" noted by the USGS are unincorporated hamlets/villages considered insignificant for census (or postal) purposes; or maybe some of them are city neighborhoods or that sort of thing.

Anyway, the top place name turned out to be Midway, with 217 instances occurring in 39 different states, including 27 instances in Texas, 22 in Tennessee, and 15 in Arkansas. These are all the place names occurring 100 or more times:

  Occurrences  States   Place Name
      217        39     Midway
      208        39     Fairview
      166        31     Oak Grove
      149        28     Five Points
      125        46     Riverside
      123        30     Pleasant Hill
      115        31     Mount Pleasant
      110        34     Bethel
      108        43     Centerville

Regarding the place name in found in the most states, my result agreed with one cited above: Riverside, in the same 46 states. And the most occurrences of the same place name in the same state was Five Points, Pennsylvania, with 31 instances (Five Points also occurred 21 times in Georgia, 17 in Alabama, and 15 in Ohio), followed by Oak Grove, Tennessee, with 29 (and 17 in Arkansas and 13 in Alabama).

Of course, none of these beats the worldwide figure mentioned above for San José. --Anonymous, 05:06 UTC, December 10, 2009.

Which gives new meaning to this song. -- Jack of Oz (Speak!) 10:52, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes. If there are actually 1,716 places with that name, theoretically you could start off in any direction, follow the associated great-circle route, and have a good chance of hitting at least one of them along the way. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:12, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Excellent results! Thanks a lot guys! I guessed it wouldn't be a placename in the English speaking world that would hold the title of 'most reused', but couldn't be sure. Right, San José it is! --KageTora - SPQW - (影虎) (talk) 14:57, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, the "most reused" name is surely not one in US/Europe. For example there are 100s (1000s?) of villages in India named Rampur. I could find no systematic way of finding the exact number online, but this search should give you some idea of how often Rampur is used as at least part of the name - and Rampur is probably not even the most common of such names in India. US census lists some 25,000 places in its survey, while India has over 600,000 villages alone; so it's not surprising that names tend to get repeated much more there. I am guessing that the situation in China would be similar, especially since linguistically it is more homogeneous. Abecedare (talk) 16:58, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I have to say - it's REALLY annoying that there isn't a single, clear answer to this! No matter the source - the answers never seem to agree. Even in a place like the US, where everything is digitised and computerised to the N'th degree - we still have no clear, unambiguous answer to this rather simple question! It's not even that the numbers are close - we have places like "Clinton" which one source claims is by far the most common name - and it doesn't appear AT ALL on some of the others! We have "San Jose" being listed as the most with 1,500 places - then we are told there is some other place with close to 20 times that number of occurances! How can we be sure of any of this when all of the sources disagree so violently about such a relatively simple matter?

Probably, the difficulty is that of having a solid criterion. For example - would a street named "Springfield Street" count as an occurrance of "Springfield"? Would it be OK if there was a river called that? Does it have to be an inhabited place? Does it have to be on maps or in the census? I think that can be the only reason we're having such a hard time answering this.

SteveBaker (talk) 21:49, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The problem is that there is no clear definition, at least in the U.S., on what an "inhabited place" means. Do we restrict it to incorporated municipalities? What then of Arlington, Virginia or Honolulu, Hawaii, neither of which is incorporated as a city. What qualifies a place name to be a place name? Do neighborhoods within incorporated cities count? What do you do when comparing a place like New England, which is organized very differently than say the Midwest or the South (see New England town)? Is a civil township a place? Is a county a place? What about place names which used to be used, but have fallen into disuse? The GNIS is likely to be riddled with places which are like this, which makes it hard to decide how to exactly count a place as a place. --Jayron32 22:07, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Yeah - sure. What surprises me is how the top name on one list isn't even in the top 10 in another. Very few (if any) of those names show up in all of the lists. Still - that's how it is. Weird. SteveBaker (talk) 04:45, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Fwiw, the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) "populated place" class includes ghost towns--that is, it includes any place that was populated at some point in time, unless the place is completely and physically removed from the landscape, in which case it is supposed to be labeled "historical". "Supposed to be" meaning only that that is what the USGS aims for, but ymmv. It also includes things not usually considered populated places, like railway sidings. Pfly (talk) 07:38, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Life Expectancy, Infant Mortality, and Death Rate

What was the life expectancy of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

What was the infant mortality rate of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

What was the under-five mortality rate of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

What was the death rate of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

What was the neonatal infant mortality rate of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

What was the early neonatal infant mortality rate of the world in 2000, in the exact beginning of the year 2000?

Bowei Huang (talk) 05:01, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure such statistics are kept to the details on a day-to-day basis. You may be able to find such demographic data for the year 2000, but I doubt that it is kept to the level of detail such that it is known for "the exact beginning" of the year (say January 1) versus the next day, or the day after that. --Jayron32 05:59, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

To answer the question more directly, the CIA World Factbook keeps most of these statistics annually, so if you want the 2000 data, you would probably need either the 2000 or the 2001 edition of the CIA World Factbook. Your local library may contain such back issues. You could also do a simple google search for all of the above terms (such as "Life expentency 2000" or something like that) and you may find results that way. Play around a bit with Google, and good things can come back to you. --Jayron32 06:03, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

A quick google search turned up this as the first link for the term I quoted above, and a link in that article led me to this database at the U.S. census. You can likely find much of the information you need there. Click "Data access", then click the "region" tab, select the data table you want, then check "world" and "2000" from the next two pull downs, and viola, you get whatever you are looking for. --Jayron32 06:08, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

If not 1 January 2000, then what about January 2000, round about the beginning of 2000, early 2000, or the year 2000? If not that, then I mean these things.

Bowei Huang (talk) 23:53, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Did you look at the links I provided? The U.S. Census International Database link I gave above has just about exactly what you need. --Jayron32 00:54, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

how can i increase my height without going to the gym?

i also cant hang from anything, because... there's no such thing to hang onto. please suggest any excercise and also, if possible, dietary needs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 122.50.132.6 (talk) 15:59, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Proper nutrition is believed to be an important component of height, but this really only applies if you're still growing. Once you're done growing, the primary options are illusions, with elevator shoes or high-heeled shoes being prime examples. There's also the extremely controversial practice of applying distraction osteogenesis to break and lengthen one's limbs. Note that "hanging from things" isn't on this list anywhere. It won't make you taller. — Lomn 16:12, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

I don't think going to the gym is going to increase your height no matter what you do, unless they have a rack. 99.166.95.142 (talk) 16:31, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Spend most of the day lying down. Apparently, standing up compresses the spine. And lying down is much nicer than standing up, especially if you're lazy like me. --Dweller (talk) 16:39, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The two main factors of determination of adult human height are genetic and diet during the periods of growth during childhood and puberty. If you want to increase your body's height and you are no longer growing, you are out of luck, since a diet change will not help you grow more (though it may help prevent losing height in the elderly), and the technology to change an adult's genes is pretty much non-existent. I suppose if an adult were to develop a pituitary disorder, they might restart growing, but that comes with some very severe consequences, and good luck finding a doctor willing to instigate something like that. Googlemeister (talk) 17:07, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Some doctors will help some people to grow taller if they're very short, by controlled injections of Human Growth Hormone. See Growth hormone treatment. 99.166.95.142 (talk) 17:33, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

(Seriously) hair style and careful choice of clothes can also give an appearance of being taller. --Dweller (talk) 18:01, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

You could always ware stilts Accdude92 (talk to me!) (sign) 18:10, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

William Goldman wrote in one of his two "screen trade" books that nearly all actors are short, and all are shorter than they want to be; and that most of them wear "risers" in their shoes, and he knows at least one who wears risers in his socks. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:14, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Heh. That reminds me of an anecdote I ran across the other day. Matt Damon (5 feet, 10 inches) will be playing South African rugby player Francois Pienaar (6 feet, 3 inches) in the movie Invictus. On meeting Pienaar for the first time, Damon reportedly blurted – in an attempt to be reassuring – "I look much bigger on film.": [1]. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 19:26, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

You might have more luck with self-acceptance.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 08:32, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Try to be seen emerging from lower-than-average doorways. This technique was explained to me at Universal Studios, California as the way they built sets to make cowboys appear big, and conversely heroinnes to appear petite with high doorways. Cuddlyable3 (talk) 22:20, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Trip from Fairbanks, Alaska to Rio Grande, Argentina

If I got the top of the line, brand new Hummer, would it be possible to drive from Fairbanks, Alaska to Rio Grande, Argentina? If so, what would be suggested that I would need? My own opinion is that it wouldn't be safe but I'm just curious. It would be a trip of a lifetime. --Reticuli88 (talk) 18:46, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

Do you mean by road? If so, you can't because there's a big gap in the Pan-American Highway as I understand it. But if you don't mind taking a ferry I'm bet you can do it. I'm sure there's a lot of crappy roads in Central and South America that would make it less safe, but very doable, particularly in a vehicle like a hummer. TastyCakes (talk) 18:50, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

You might be interested in reading Road Fever by Tim Cahill, who drove from Tierra del Fuego to Prudhoe Bay. --LarryMac | Talk 19:06, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

OH! I can't wait to get that book! Thanks! LarryMac! --Reticuli88 (talk) 13:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

The gap is called the Darién Gap. The article claims it is "frequented" by 4WD vehicles, but there's no explanation of what this really means. Comet Tuttle (talk) 19:08, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

While I wouldn't be surprised if hobbyists and regularly ventured into the fringes of the Gap, I suspect that few are interested in trying a full crossing. Based on the article, it appears that there have been infrequent attempts to completely cross the gap using four-wheel-drive vehicles (Land Rovers and Jeeps), motorcycles, bicycles, and even on foot. Most such attempts have employed ferries or barges to cross over or move along portions of the Atrato River. The first successful, all-land, four-wheel vehicle journey across the entire Gap took place between 1985 and 1987, taking a stunning 741 days to travel 125 miles. (That trip employed a CJ-5 Jeep.) It's actually faster to do it by bicycle or motorcycle, because you don't have to go around quite so many rocks and trees.... TenOfAllTrades(talk) 19:20, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

The Wikipedia article says that the 1959-60 crossing by Land Rover zoomed across (partly over water) at an ear-popping speed of one furlong—220 yds, 1/8 mile or 201 metres—per hour. Of course the armies of World War I could take months to advance (or retreat) that distance. Usain Bolt took less than 20 seconds (1/180 of an hour) to cover 200 metres in the 2008 Summer Olympics and Veronica Campbell-Brown took less than 22. —— Shakescene (talk) 10:43, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

My brother and his new bride did almost this very trip for their honeymoon a few years ago and as a practical matter skipped Colombia anyway, due to political/crime problems there. They did it in a 30 year old van (guess which brand), so you don't need anything new or top of the line. --Sean 19:53, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

If I were making the selection of vehicle, I wouldn't choose an H3. They're too luxury and not enough offroad. Additionally, when you break something, it will be harder to find parts in South America for anything like a new H3. Go for something older that's easier to work on. If it were me, I'd go with a Jeep CJ, YJ, or TJ or one of a number of Toyota trucks or even a Land Rover. Dismas|^(talk) 22:20, 10 December 2009 (UTC)

You might find this archived question of interest. Astronaut (talk) 05:02, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

People are too easily dazzled by the Hummer brand name. The H3 isn't anything special - it's an Isuzu chassis that's also used on a bunch of relatively recent GM/Chevvy trucks. H2's are Chevvy Tahoes with different body panels...a soccer Mom's SUV dressed up to look like a serious off-roader. The only Hummer that's in any way a special kind of off-road monster is the original military HMMMV and the civilian version of it. Of course those are a total liability in town - they are hard to drive, impossible to park - but they will get you through rough terrain better than one of the more modern soccer-mom-Hummers. In the back-of-beyond, what you need is something with a really good likelyhood of being able to get decent spares. If you break an axle on an H3 halfway through South America - you're screwed. You can't tow it out and you can't fix it. You need something much more basic - something that any shade-tree mechanic can fix - something that's been in use out there for enough years that the junkyards of South America are full of spares. I'm not surprised that someone could make it in a VW microbus - those things are stunningly reliable - and very easy to fix. If your H3 shows a Check-Engine light, you have zero chance of fixing it without a computer and all sorts of other complicated stuff. Pick an old Jeep or a Land Rover or something - find out what people are actually driving out there. Something that's already survived 20 years in those harsh conditions is the thing that's most likely to survive another year to get you where you're going. Something new and shiney with too much high-tech is not a great choice.

SteveBaker (talk) 05:11, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Besides the obvious issues of dealing with the terrain, there's one key question about The Gap: Where do you get gasoline? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:25, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

The article says that the gap is 99 miles straight across with the first crossing taking a total of 125 miles. I don't know how to estimate HMMMV millage over rough terrain, but it doesn't seem unreasonable that you could carry the fuel with you. I'm assuming that there are reasonable sources of fuel to either side of the gap. APL (talk) 07:31, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

At those very low speeds, miles-per-gallon becomes a meaningless concept. Hours-per-gallon is probably a closer measure...but even so, it's very dependent on how you are able to drive. SteveBaker (talk) 22:32, 12 December 2009 (UTC)

Personally I think the most obvious issue is the one Reticuli and Sean mention, i.e. how do you deal with the people with guns who'd have no qualms about kidnapping you for money or other purposes? Nil Einne (talk) 10:39, 11 December 2009 (UTC)

Thanks everyone for your input! (btw) I donated $ but my comment dodn't show up!  :( --Reticuli88 (talk) 13:23, 11 December 2009 (UTC)