Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2015 October 18

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October 18

If the Antarctica dollar is not a real currency, why does it have an expiration date?

here is written about http://www.polymernotes.de/polcaps/antarktis/antarktis.html the expirations date of each series of the banknotes, why does somebody need this? Why can´t this damn money be up to date forever and if it is expired what does it mean for me? Is the "guarantee" now over or what is the sense? --Maxjob314 (talk) 10:03, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

According to Antarctican dollar, they are produced by an entity which calls themselves the "Antarctica Overseas Exchange Office". The name suggests and [1] suggests with a link to [2] which seems to confirm along with [3] that you can exchange the dollars for their equivalent in US currency until the expiration date which also seems to be what you pay for them +shipping. So having an expiration date is part of how they make money as they can be confident US currency made from notes not returned after the expiration date is now theirs. (Although I doubt they actually wait that long to use the money, so theoretically if everyone did decide to exchange their valid money, I'm sure they'll collapse like happens with a bank run in any fractional-reserve banking system. However since the vast majority of customers aren't buying the currency with the intention to ever exchange it and it's unlikely there'll ever be that many who do suddenly have a reason, they can be fairly confident this won't happen.) Nil Einne (talk) 10:48, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

you could exchange this money back to us dollar? Why should someone wanting this, this Money is only for collectors and for giving out the money, they wanted to have some money for special expeditions to the antarctica, if nobody takes the money, no expedition will be made--Maxjob314 (talk) 13:16, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

The "money" is just certificates printed by some random person or group. No one in Antarctica actually uses them for money. I guess if you like the design or whatever, go nuts, but don't expect anyone to accept it as money. As discussed above, apparently they promise to exchange the notes back for U.S. dollars (minus shipping and handling!) as long as they aren't "expired". Does this promise give the notes monetary value? It depends on your trust in the issuer. Let's just say I'm not going to be accepting them as payment anytime soon. To be fair, they appear to explicitly be selling the bills as novelty items; looking at their website, they sell a bunch of other "fake monies" from historical states like the Mayan Empire. I infer they're not trying to scam people like the Liberty Dollar guy. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 19:24, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

• If you want to know more about "pseudo-currency" of this type, they are sometimes called "chits" or "vouchers" (usually if paper money) or "tokens" (if coin money). While the Antarctican Dollars are just cute little collectors items, with no value, and no real purpose except as a curiosity, there have been some moneys of similar properties which did have limited monetary value; this was often called scrip, and has been used by private businesses (see Company scrip, a form of Private currency) and governments (for example Japanese invasion money) or a combination of both (see Notgeld). The U.S. Military often used scrip for use on bases at PX Stores on bases in foreign lands, ostensibly to prevent hard currency from being spent off-base; my father has examples of Vietnam-era scrip he had in the 1960s while stationed in South Korea; he was paid in scrip which could only be exchanged state-side dollar-for-dollar with regular U.S. bills. --Jayron32 19:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

There are the various complementary, community or local currencies like BerkShares, Totnes pound, Lewes Pound, Calgary Dollar, Salt Spring dollar and Chiemgauer, but as you say those are intended to be circulating. And many of them are backed up by whatever the national currency is too, whoever is providing it (is supposed to) have reserves of the national currency to ensure exchange. (Not all though, some like the Calgary dollar are only backed by those accepting them [4].)

As 71 said, and I was trying to indicate, the currency is sold as a novelty item, the ability to exchange it back to US currency is more of an aside. And as I mentioned, I strongly suspect they don't have sufficient reserves to ensure they can exchange all unexpired notes, but it doesn't really matter, because it was never the purpose. (Definitely I couldn't find anything on the website suggesting the "currency" is actually backed with money held anywhere.).

As to why they decided to allow exchange, I presume it was to make it seem more like a real currency, but I don't really know. It seems clear they were never intending the currency to circulate, or for anyone else to accept them for anything.

Nil Einne (talk) 02:54, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

It's a common enough racket. Just look at the kiosks of "gift cards" left like mousetraps near the checkouts of many a modern supermarket. It's a way to get an effective loan of money, plus if the expiration date passes the issuer has a chance to just hold on to it. Lots of chiselers do it, because if you have the economy of scale it costs little to issue a gift card, very little shelf space to sell it, and delivers such potential rewards. Wnt (talk) 19:21, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

why is there no video or something like that for the game AS Adema 149–0 SO l'Emyrne ?

--Maxjob314 (talk) 13:14, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

How do you know there's no video? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:31, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

There certainly should be a video made but the cast of the unissued epic Arbroath 36–0 Bon Accord shall in no circumstances whatever be asked to perform again in Blackface. Bestfaith (talk) 13:43, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

This 149-0 match should not count in any statistic or record about official football. Normal thing to do with such match should be to discard it as a real match, and to name it what it is: a fake, an accident, an arrangement, a sabotage, etc, any such name that should show that it was not a true football match. The fact that officials of football decide to keep such match within the charts of real matches of the history of football, is yet another proof that football is not much about sports, that football is more about propaganding the masses and about cheating and stealing. Akseli9 (talk) 17:49, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Listen all of y'all it's a sabotage... Sorry, when I read "a sabotage" the song immediately started playing in my head. --71.119.131.184 (talk) 19:28, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Great song, thanks for the reminder, long time I didn't listen to the Beastie Boys. Sorry, as a French speaker I know I leave far too often on you English-speakers the burden of translating into correct-English all these faux-amis that I use directly from French language as if they were synonyms. Akseli9 (talk) 22:12, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

I'm surprised that the officials let them get away with that. Isn't there any provision in soccer for forfeiture due to "making a mockery of the match" or something like that? Or maybe there is now, after that fiasco? It's also to bad they couldn't have made it a nicely rounded 150. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Mockery, thank you, it's the word I was looking for. Akseli9 (talk) 22:12, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

"Bringing the game into disrepute" would be the likeliest applicable offense. No separate Wikipedia article, but several mention it. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:31, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

The coach was suspended for three years, four players were suspended until the end of the season. Ssscienccce (talk) 21:50, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

Is there any provision in soccer for forfeiting a game? If so, once the refs figured out what the "game plan" was, they could have said, "We're done here." ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:54, 21 October 2015 (UTC)

Number of individual contributors to presidential candidates

For the candidates of the 2016 US presidential election, there are statistics available on the amount of money placed on each of the candidates, but is there any information on the number of donors for each candidate? I googled for such queries as "statistics donors +chaffee +Huckabee +Carson +Webb Sanders Fiorina" (leaving out names such as Bush and Clinton to avoid false positives), but with no results. — Sebastian 21:46, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

There is info on the percentage coming from various contribution levels by the FEC [5] reported on by many sources e.g. [6] [7] [8]. You could use the lower tiers to get a very rough estimate for how many donors would be involved. But other than various boasts from candidates [9][10] [11] I can't find simple data showing the number of donors for each candidate, I think because it doesn't exist.

You may be confused by some sources like [12]. However if you read the WSJ (second link I provided) or the FEC website [13], only contributors who have contributed more than $200 in total to a campaign need to be itemised/listed. So although most campaigns will I think collect the data on contributors who've contributed less than that (partially to ensure they follow the rules incase you contribute more and end up over the $200 limit, but to be frank probably more so they can bug you for more money), they don't have to report it to the FEC.

To confirm, if you download the data from the FEC [14], Sanders only has about 69k listed contributors (likely an overestimate due to duplicates) while Clinton has about 84k (ditto). Sanders is clearly quite far from the 1 million 680k contributors, I presume because most have not contributed more than $200 so don't have to be listed. (Either that or they lied to Sanders, I'm a bit unclear how much effort a candidate has to make to ensure the person is providing real information when donating so that their total contribution can be counted.) In other words, while the information is collected by the candidates, how, if and when they want to release it is up to them. (Also pay attention to what candidates are saying in their boasts. I earlier made a mistake of reporting the 1 million figure for Sanders, but that is the number of contributions, not the deduplicated number of donors.)

Nil Einne (talk) 09:00, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

BTW, as I understand it, this only relates to contributions made directly to candidates. Money to the various types of Political action committees is seperate. Nil Einne (talk) 11:49, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Primative People

So with modern Europeans having traces of neanderthal dna & modern Africans having little to none; is it possible to say all non-white modern humans relate more closely with our Homo sapient ancestors than to the Neanderthal and vice versa? There was obviously a large contrast between our African ancestors and the Neanderthals that inhabited most of Europe and parts of what is now the Middle East. Contrasting in terms of genes but more noticeably, their appearance. The African ancestors no doubt being black, about the same size as modern humans and being more advanced as a species and the neanderthals being fairer skinned, larger, hairier and more of hunter-gatherer tribes than a advanced society. They even differed in skull shapes also in sizes of bones and other things. Its said that neanderthals "disappeared" basically. Either through war or breeding. Its unlikely that it was through war because the neanderthal would be a lost species, instead everyone on the planet except for some people in Africa carry neanderthal dna. This means the modern human bred with neanderthals while also living among them and their offspring. Possibly only for a short period of time. Its obvious the neanderthals had recessive genes that aren't passed down to their children when mixed with our ancient African ancestors. The child would resemble the modern human more than the neanderthal. If this wasn't the case then we would still have full neanderthals walking amongst us. Homo sapiens at that time were only African and from there or places we would now consider the Middle East. Historically Africans have never fully populated European countries. This is for a large varying number of reasons. BUT possibly the homo sapient gene is so dominant over the neanderthal gene, for the time ancient Africans lived and bred amongst ancient Europeans or Neanderthals (though it might of been short) the homo sapient, original human gene they carried dominated over the neanderthal gene. The ancient Africans didn't populate alot of Europe and didn't stay long enough to fully change the appearance of the then neanderthal but the gene the ancient Africans carried dominated throughout the children of the mixed offspring. Generations later you have what is now the modern human being. So with all this information and knowing that black people carry the dominant gene over the white recessive gene; white people or people who's ancestors originate from Europe are more closely related to Neanderthals & that black people or people who's ancestors are African are more closely related to the original human. So to say the neanderthal has disappeared is wrong. Anybody who identifies their ancestry as European are grandchildren to the neanderthal. The genes the africans carried were passed down to modern people of european descent when they met the neanderthal and bred with them. The ancient Africans just never populated enough of Europe to pass down the skin color and appearance of an African person. The "human" gene which we all poses today was the only gene strong enough to be passed down through the neanderthal family. Which is why "white" people or people of European descent carry traces of neanderthal while "black" people carry little to none. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.195.27.47 (talk) 23:20, 18 October 2015 (UTC)

"all non-white modern humans relate more closely with our Homo sapient ancestors than to the Neanderthal" - there are several points of confusion here. Firstly neanderthals are one of the ancestors of modern humans (or Homo sapiens) so any relation to neanderthals is a relation to one of our ancestors. Second, the evidence suggests all modern humans are probably more closely related to other ancestors than they are to neanderthals. While neanderthals have made some contribution to the modern human genome, that contribution appears to be small compared to other contributions.

Finally, Han Chinese and other East Asians are not considered White people in the vast majority of definitions, but may have a greater contribution from neanderthal than most people who are considered white. Maasai and some others also appear to have neanderthal contributions, although I'm not sure how it comescompares to those who may be considered "white". Although considering the limited information available on our ancestral genomes, I think we also should look at any percentage or numeric contributions with caution. (Actually there's some evidence many people in Africa like the Khoisan for example may have some contribution from Eurasian migrants, likely including some neaderthal contribution, but I suspect it is probably lower than for "white" people.)

See Archaic human admixture with modern humans, [15] [16] for more.

Nil Einne (talk) 02:01, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Edit: Also [17] [18]. 07:40, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

A parenthetical note: there is no letter A in the word "primitive". HandsomeFella (talk) 06:22, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Unless he's making a semi-subtle joke about "primates". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 07:16, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Per those links contributed by Nil Einne, the short version is that due to a large influx of Eurasians back into Africa around 3000BCE, virtually all sub-Saharan Africans have around 1/2% of Neanderthal DNA rather than almost none as previously thought, and all the rest of us have around 1/2% more than previously thought (because the baseline has changed). {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 185.74.232.130 (talk) 14:38, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

Note that Denisovans and Neanderthals are believed to share common ancestry; as such, it isn't all that clear that they're separate species (indeed, Neanderthals' status relative to H. sapiens is controversial) The unknown hominin in Africa is, well, unknown, but conceivably could turn out to be another branch of the same group, leaving the differences less than what people have in mind. It's still a few hundred thousand years of independent evolution of a few percent of the genome ... not meaningless, but not that dramatic. It shouldn't really surprise us that humans would try to screw anything that moves; more interesting of course is whether the different species/subspecies learned to talk to one another, had comparable thought processes etc. So this is a smoking gun of some kind of interaction, which remains frustratingly obscured behind our booth's curtain until we put in another quarter.

The OP's main confusion is that he doesn't understand dominant gene and recessive gene. Outside of a very rare example, which in humans would be a foreign and frightening artificial imposition, called gene drive, a gene doesn't destroy or change its rivals. When a person inherits a dominant and a recessive gene, he looks like he inherited two copies of the dominant. That's all it means. When he fathers a child, it's 50/50 which gets passed on. And because there are only two copies (usually) there is no blurring that out - with something like achondroplasia the dominant stands out, present in one kid but not in another, and all the dominance means practically is that the ratio is different from what it would be if it were recessive. Wnt (talk) 15:04, 19 October 2015 (UTC)

There was some interbreeding between early modern humans and Neanderthals in Eurasia, but the genome suggests that Neanderthals were greatly outnumbered by early modern humans (originally from Africa) among the ancestors of ALL modern ethnic groups. So all modern humans are overwhelmingly of African origin. If in fact Neanderthals were fair-skinned and hairier, they almost certainly did not transmit those traits to modern humans. See this article. According to our article Human skin color and the sources it cites, skin pigmentation can evolve fairly rapidly over a few thousand years to adapt to a new environment. In tropical environments, darker skin has adaptive value because it protects against the ultraviolet rays of the strong tropical sun. However, that dark pigmentation gets in the way of Vitamin D synthesis in regions with less sunlight. In those regions, lighter skin is more adaptive and will tend to evolve. Marco polo (talk) 15:10, 19 October 2015 (UTC)