Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 January 12

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January 12

Anonymous

The recent declaration of war from Anonymous against terrorists has me wondering, what actual harm has Anonymous done to anyone that they have taken a dislike to? Yes, they've shut down web sites and such but those are back up and running in hours/days. Have they been responsible for anyone who was doing anything illegal getting discovered, arrested, or killed? Dismas|^(talk) 02:15, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Timeline of events associated with Anonymous recounts numerous occasions where the harm done was significant - either financial (loss of business and excess bandwidth charges, for example) or personal (families receiving hate mail, obscene phone calls, and bogus pizza and pornography deliveries for example). In the case of the attack on the Epilepsy foundation, these attacks actually attempted to cause epileptic siezures by replacing normal support forum content with violently flashing screens, etc.

So, yeah - the harm is very often real. Whether it's justified is very often a matter of opinion. So read the list and form your own. SteveBaker (talk) 04:17, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Also keep in mind, Anonymous (with a capital) is still just anonymous (without). The same generic type have been fighting the War on Terror since before it started. Find any drone attack story, and look for the name of the killer. It'll be something as vague. If we don't know which Anonymous are doing what, we can't keep score. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:35, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Apparently, the pro-ISIS nobodies are equally suited to wage slightly annoying war on America. InedibleHulk (talk) 03:32, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Major League Baseball

Why do major league ball players always high five and congradulate their own players instead of the opponets after a game? Other proffesional sports do. How can we teach our younger generation sportsmanship this way? [Email removed] — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.80.208.154 (talk) 03:15, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

It's human nature to look out for ourselves, and those who help us. Same sort of reason we generally don't buy groceries for the neighbour kids instead of our own. There's only so much to go around. In baseball, instead of food and self preservation, it's confidence and self esteem. If you give that to the team trying to knock you out of the playoffs, you'd be helping yourself fail. If you encourage your team, you might get your face in the cereal aisle one day.

If we want to shape humans against their nature, parenting, school and mass media are the surest bets. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:14, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

It used to not be done at all, except at the end of a given Stanley Cup series. It was actively discouraged. It was called "fraternization". You see a lot more of it now, in basketball and football, and it turns up in baseball once in a while too, much more so at the amateur level such as Little League. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:42, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

They sure didn't want any of that in pro wrestling, back while it still had a semblance of sport. All American boy Jim Duggan was set for stardom in 1987, until he was arrested driving with pot and coke. That wasn't much of a problem (still isn't), but he was driving with his rival, The Iron Sheik. Never near the top again.

In 1995, a group of main event opponents took a curtain call in Madison Square Garden. Two were leaving, one was too big to fail, but the would-be King of the Ring (1996) went to Dugganville. Unlike Duggan, he later became Triple H, who was recently announced for the International Sports Hall of Fame.

If fraternization hurts the credibility of a sport in Vince McMahon's eyes, you know it has to be pretty unbelievable. InedibleHulk (talk) 05:41, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

The no-fraternization rule in baseball probably goes back, at least in part, to times when gambling was rampant in the sport. If players of opposite teams were a little too cozy, fans could rightfully feel suspicious that collusion might be going on. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 06:06, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Yes, rightfully. InedibleHulk (talk) 08:55, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

And that list doesn't even get into the "suspicious but not proven" concerns contemporaries had about the World Series of 1918, 1917, 1914, and possibly others. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:31, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Such as my concern that they started the World War as a smokescreen. Is it also any coincidence that Strangler Lewis was suddenly reinvigorated the week after Pearl Harbor? It's what Wikipedia doesn't want us to know. Many lies in that article. Probably why they call that era the "dark age" of wrestling. InedibleHulk (talk) 00:24, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Funny. It's worth noting that there was debate as to whether to even have a season in 1918, and the "Work or Fight" order truncated the season and caused the Series to be held in early September. It was sparsely attended, to the point where the players nearly went on strike due to expected low revenues for the players' shares. If the fix was in (which was never proven), then it would have been in order to augment their shares. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:36, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

If you want to be shady and unproven, best to do it in sparse attendance. That's why the inaugural Intercontinental Championship was won in a major tournament (also allegedly early September) on the one continent that, to this day, hasn't had any Intercontinental title match. This was sixty years after WWI, but still in the "dark age" before the Internet spoiled every joke. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

In football (or soccer), some of the major players on opposing sides will exchange shirts with each other after a major game. This was banned for a short while a few years ago, but the players are still doing it. It's a show of gratitude to fellow players who are doing the same job, very similar to the Christmas Truce in 1914, when soldiers on both sides met, played football, and gave each other gifts, including parts of their uniforms. The high-five, by the way, is rarely used in the UK but you might see it in football games, usually during a substitution - this is actually a rule of the game. In real life, an adult may do it with a child, but children don't do it with each other, and very rarely do adults do it with each other. There is no particlar reason for this, it's just that it hasn't caught on. KägeTorä - (^影_虎) (Chin Wag) 06:31, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

The "high five" is often seen in cricket, even by English chaps. It is however, not without risk - see High five mishap for Hadds. Australians, what are they like? Alansplodge (talk) 16:44, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Touching gloves before (or during) a round is increasingly (sometimes sickeningly) common in mixed martial arts. Also a bit risky. Here, a sportsmanlike fighter approaches an effective fighter with the wrong idea about what hands are for, and gets kicked in the ribs for it. There are many other examples and opinions on whether not being nice to someone before you hurt them is like cheating. InedibleHulk (talk) 04:36, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

One thing that is specific to Major League Baseball: teams play one another very often during a season (it used to go up to 18 games or more per year), and these games usually come in blocks of two to four over consecutive days. You don't go all friendly with an opposing team you are going to be playing them again tomorrow or in a couple of weeks, in part because of the issues evoked by Bugs. Sportsmanship can be expressed in different ways, for example when a superstar player is about to retire, and all opposing teams play him tribute with gifts etc., as we saw last season with Derek Jeter. --Xuxl (talk) 09:12, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Tennis is another sport where the competitors congratulate each other at the end of a match, that being a "gentlemen's sport". Not so much with professional ball. In the old days of the "original 16" across the two major leagues, each team would play each other team 22 times, for a total of 154 games. Celebratory stuff was not so common in those days. The winning team would have a big "group hug" when clinching the league title or winning the World Series, and that was about it. Usually the losing team would slink away into their clubhouse. At least in part it was the fan factor. The Yankees and Dodgers during the late 40s to late 50s were a fierce rivalry. Yogi Berra has said they were friends off the field, but the game was strictly serious business. And that's from a man who was more expressive than many of his era. Maybe you've seen the clip of the end of Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956. When Dale Mitchell took strike 3, Larsen walked off the mound toward the sidelines as if it were just any other end-of-inning. But Yogi ran out and leaped into his arms. Purists would have said that was excessive, because it was just one game, they hadn't won the Series yet. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:11, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

• The high-five is celebratory, and the team which has lost may not be in the mood. Handshakes are allowed in professional baseball, and post-game hand shakes were the norm for children's sports matches, but that has gone the wayside due to taunting and violence, see this decision, for example. μηδείς (talk) 17:59, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

• Not quite what you asked, but two examples from martial arts fit the scope: I'm very fond of bowing in Judo ... but if you seek to be more physical in showing your respect: In Schwingen (not a professional sport, but still taken very seriously), "by tradition the winner brushes the sawdust off the loser's back after the match". ---Sluzzelin talk 21:10, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

I just watched two major league fighters giddily swap hats like schoolgirls, after the promoter (half) jokingly told them to pretend to hate each other. Thankfully, there'll be no glove touching in the main event. And there's a good chance it ends in rib-kicking. InedibleHulk (talk) 06:42, 17 January 2015 (UTC)

black bars on pre-paid envelope

What are the black bars next to the "2" on a pre-paid envelope called? For example. Do they have a specific name, or an article? Are they made out of special ink that the sorting office can scan to know what they mean? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Envelopequestion (talk • contribs) 17:24, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

Postage marks in general are called indicia, and Royal Mail uses that name for the Freepost/Business Reply mark with the two vertical lines, e.g. here. I can't find any information about what the lines are supposed to mean, but they're obviously not a barcode and they can't require special ink because businesses print these envelopes themselves, so I can only assume they mean something like "this space intentionally left blank". -- BenRG (talk) 19:31, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

They've looked like that for over 30 years - so I suspect that they are there to allow automatic machinery from circa 1980's to detect whether a letter is 1st or 2nd class post. These days, the recognition systems are good enough to spot a tiny mark or pattern as the letter zips past at high speed - but the further you go back in time, the harder that would have been to detect. So my guess is that they used these large, heavy black bars to minimize the error rate - and the post office never got around to changing the system. If that sounds kinda primitive - here in the US, if we take a bunch of post to the desk at the post office - all carefully marked with that pattern of short and long bars that encodes the destination - they still manually type the Zip code, city and state for every envelope and parcel instead of just scanning the code. Crazy. SteveBaker (talk) 19:50, 12 January 2015 (UTC)

It's RM4SCC, which is a machine readable version of the postcode. If you look carefully at a delivered envelope with a hand-written address, you should see in faint red ink (it's more visible under UV light) a similar pattern. It is painted onto the envelopes by a reader at the first sorting office the letter goes through, and is used by all subsequent sorting machines. LongHairedFop (talk) 12:41, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

He's talking about the two thick bars in the top right hand corner of the envelope, not the short bars printed above the address. --Viennese Waltz 13:37, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

THIS basically. SteveBaker (talk) 20:14, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

Yeah the OP already posted an example in his question. --Viennese Waltz 20:20, 13 January 2015 (UTC)

All they do is distinguish between first and second class post. The bars are closer together on a first class envelope.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 11:18, 14 January 2015 (UTC)