Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2013 April 12

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April 12

Buckingham Life Insurance Company

What is the history of Buckingham Life Insurance Company in the United States? Was this company acquired by another life insurance company? 68.42.100.170 (talk) 01:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Economics 101: Law of Supply & Demand.

So, when demand far exceeds supply - and we're strictly supply-limited for some reason, then prices need to go up - right?

That much is obvious...don't really need economists to explain that!

My question is whether there is some kind of rule-of-thumb of how high prices should to be pushed to reduce demand by some amount. I know that my supply is 150% over-subscribed by the current demand...so should prices go up 10%, 20%...50%? Obviously there can't be any kind of hard-and-fast rule, I can see that it's going to depend on too many variables for that. But surely actual working businesses must use some kind of guesstimate to try to get it right?

Any ideas?

SteveBaker (talk) 02:28, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

What type of enterprise are you considering? Many small firms? A few large firms? A single firm? The answer to your question is in part a function of that factor, i.e. how much control they have over the market, and how much control someone has over them, if any. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 03:09, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

It's a single small business. Manufacturing capacity is pegged at the limit - and people are demanding the product in numbers far greater than that. SteveBaker (talk) 03:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

See Market clearing. In a nutshell, the price needs to rise to the point where a sufficient portion of the buyers drop out of the market, thereby bringing supply and demand back into equilibrium DOR (HK) (talk) 03:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Yes - I understand that - but if I wake up one day and discover that my demand has grown to (say) 150% of my supply - how much should I push the price of my product up in order to produce that desired balance. I could nudge it by 1% per week - until demand falls to where I can keep up - but I'd like to get somewhere into the right ballpark with one shot. Are there no handy rules of thumb? (Like "Increase the price by 5% for every 10% of excess demand.")...I kinda suspect that the answer is "No" - which is a typical problem with "soft" sciences...but I figure it's worth a shot. SteveBaker (talk) 03:48, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

You'd need to do some surveys and actually ask people what they would be willing to pay. Or, you can do things like eBay auctions to let the market set the price directly. The price elasticity of demand is a measure of how quickly demand will fall off as price rises. For some things, which aren't very critical and have ready substitutes, the price can't rise by much. For example, if the price of soy milk went too high, people would switch to almond milk, coconut milk, or real milk. For other things, which are critical and have no substitute, like artificial hearts, the price could continue to rise until it hits a point where people simply are unable to pay. StuRat (talk) 03:55, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

There's only a rule of thumb if you know what the distribution of demand is. Roughly speaking, you can imagine each potential buyer as having an associated price - the maximum price at which they'd buy your product. You can then produce a curve charting the price of the product versus the number of people who would buy at that price (basically, the sum of all the people who have a maximum price greater than that current set price). That curve is going to be different based on the amount of demand, and where you are in the curve. If you have a lot of people that are only marginally interested (a low maximum price), and a lot of people who are very interested (high maximum price), you'll have a large flat spot in the middle where the price doesn't affect demand much, as there's noone with a critical price in that region. On the other hand, if you have few people who are very interested, and few who are marginally interested, but instead have a large number who are medially interested, you'll have a much larger drop off in demand in the same price range. -- 71.35.98.207 (talk) 05:16, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

You also have to take into account the nature of the demand. For example, in the middle of a hypothetical desert, water and hula hoops are both in very short supply. However, you'll be able to jack up the price of water a lot more because it's vital to survival. I doubt that anyone is going to give a kidney or first born child for a hula hoop. Also, the nature of the supply is important. Will supply improve in six months, as entreprenuers start responding to the need for hula hoops by building factories or the need for water by drilling wells? Again, that also depends on the nature of the demand. A plentiful supply of water in the future may mean little to someone who is dying of thirst right now, whereas a plentiful supply of cheaper hula hoops in the future will probably induce consumers to postpone their purchase. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 07:30, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Remember you have other options too such as increasing manufacturing capacity. If this is the business you summarized somewhat recently, have you considered getting a second laser cutter or a faster/more efficient one? Perhaps you could outsource the cutting. It may cost more, but it also frees up your time for R&D, letting you use your in-house cutter to experiment with new products or custom orders. If the bottleneck is in packing and shipping, it may be time to try to determine if there is enough demand that the increased sales can support hiring someone to help out. Upping the price to the ideal for supply/demand will optimize your profits with your current setup, but expanding your business may work out better in the long run. 38.111.64.107 (talk) 14:34, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

• I don't have anything to add, but would like to emphasize the essential thing mentioned above: you are trying to figure out the price elasticity of demand for your product. Looie496 (talk) 15:22, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Steve, have you detected an increased demand for my lungs? --Dweller (talk) 15:52, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Many thanks...the answers from 71.35.98.207 and Dominus Vobisdu really help me to think more clearly about this...but they don't resolve the problem!

38.111.64.107 correctly deduces that I'm thinking about my g/f's business "Renaissance Miniatures". We have just launched a Kickstarter - with the goal of doubling production by adding a second laser cutter (we make laser-cut plywood building models for tabletop gamers). We expected to earn maybe $30,000 - but the backers are going nuts for this stuff - and we might make $80,000. Even with that second laser cutter - we'd be totally snowed under. There is really no such thing as a faster laser cutter here. We already have a "Rolls Royce" machine. In order to move the cutting head faster, you have to apply more laser energy to keep the amount of energy per millimeter moved high enough to cut plywood. Going from a 120Watt machine to (say) a 240Watt beast causes horrific issues with keeping it cool...that's just not a do-able thing.

We considered buying a third or even a fourth laser cutter - but the trouble is that other limitations of our production process hit limits before a third laser cutter would be fully loaded - and a fourth machine would just sit idle because we wouldn't be able to package and ship the product at the rate that four machines would churn it out. That would be more work than one person can do. So we'd really need to employing a second person. But brings in a raft of other problems. Just consider insurance for "workers comp" for example. Those insurers would take one look at having someone being paid to use a home-made laser cutter with a 120 watt IR laser and they'd run away screaming!

So we have a point of resistance. With sales of $X we're severely overworked - but we can't take on another person to relieve that workload unless we earn at least $Y after expenses. Since Y is much greater than X, we have a problem. We can't grow the company smoothly from a "home business" earning $X to a business with employees at $Y. The answer seems to me to be to increase prices. That increases the profit margin - which closes the gap between $X and $Y...maybe eliminates it entirely. Economics 101 tells us that prices can rise when demand exceeds supply - which it does!

The tricky part is getting a feel for how much we can increase prices without killing the business. An experimental approach is dangerous because we rely on customer loyalty, and an overly high price jump might destroy that. A slow gradual increase in prices while we carefully monitor sales volume doesn't solve the problem because our income comes in large lumps at the end of a month-long kickstart...during which we can't change our prices anyway.

Hence, I was hoping for some kind of rule-of-thumb or tool to give me some clue as to how much to push prices with a known amount of supply and over-demand. Asking our customers "How much would you pay for X?" isn't likely to work because they'll obviously give me a low number! Also, we don't really have competitors that we can look at. Those that exist have mostly fallen by the wayside - or do not have comparable product.

Well, I guess if it was easy, anyone could do it!

SteveBaker (talk) 16:20, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Trying to set a price that limits demand is a bad idea. If you get it wrong, or if demand drops for whatever reason, your business can collapse. That price should really be your upper bound. Instead ask yourself what price you need in order to be happy. What price do you need to enable you to do a level of work you can handle sustainably and still make a profit that is sufficient for your needs? If your customers are willing to pay that price, then everything is golden. Don't worry too much about unmet demand -- just be careful to inform your customers of your current backlog and the likely delay until their orders are filled. If you have lots of customers begging for quicker service, you can think about ways of expanding the business, but of course that always carries risks. Looie496 (talk) 16:56, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I disagree. The alternatives are having unmet demand or increasing production. The first means lost profit, and the 2nd could be more disasterous, if this item is a fad which passes, leaving Steve with unpaid-for laser cutters and excess inventory. StuRat (talk) 16:52, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

One suggestion, you can gauge the market for more expensive items by offering a "premium line". They don't actually have to cost any more to make. You can just put them in a gold-colored box or something. Or, how about putting a laser-cut signature on the base and call it "our signature series", for twice the price ? That should quickly let you know if that price is sustainable. Then you can give priority to production of those orders, since they have a higher profit margin. This effectively allows you to raise or lower the average price by changing the ratio of normal and premium items produced. StuRat (talk) 16:52, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Having a good excess of demand is great for your business. Operate a waiting list, and it says about you that what you offer is quality and highly regarded by other customers. It also gives you some buffer against recessionary problems, especially if you charge a small but non-refundable deposit to customers either when they place the order or when they hit a certain position/time in the queue. As Looie says, communication is key, but this is one problem you can perceive as a strength. Finally, the waiting list idea will give you real data, peace of mind and bargaining strength with potential lenders, if you do decide to up your output. --Dweller (talk) 17:02, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I have a problem with an article and its content

There is an article on wikipedia containing my name for some terrorist attack in yemen in 1992. I was only born in 1996 and never been to yemen. Although I removed it off wikipedia some other web pages have the exact copy of the previous page. How do I get rid of them?? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 103.247.50.137 (talk) 05:17, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

There are two aspects here. First, your name is very probably not unique to yourself. Maybe the article was correct, and just referred to another person with the same name. Secondly, in general there is no practicable way to remove information that is even moderately widely spread on the internet. However, many of the more visible sites that mirror Wikipedia content will eventually get the latest version from Wikipedia. So when its gone here, it will probably go there. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 06:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

It would really help if you told us to which article you are referring, and then we can check its accuracy and the sources of the information.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 09:13, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Wikipedia has very specific rules about how we describe living people. The WP:BLP standard definitely applies here...and specifically, the sub-section entitled "Dealing with articles about yourself". Because this kind of problem is not at all uncommon in an encyclopedia with four point two million entries and uncountable numbers of vandals, troll, idiots and malcontents, we have a specific place where you can go to lodge this sort of complaint. I strongly suggest that you go to: Wikipedia:Biographies of living persons/Noticeboard and repeat your problem there. (They will need to know both your name and the title of the article in question though!). My best guess is that there just happens to be another person with your name...that's really not uncommon. There are at least nineteen articles about people with the same name as me in the encyclopedia! (There are also two places where my name is mentioned and it *IS* about me!) SteveBaker (talk) 15:39, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

There seems to be a few hundred people around with exact same forename and surname as me, and I thought my name wasn't all that common. Very annoying, shove off all the rest of you ;-) Dmcq (talk) 11:38, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Remember: You are one in a million ! Of course, given the world population, that means you have some 7000 exact clones out there, over 1000 of which are Chinese. StuRat (talk) 16:41, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Any writers that started as wikipedia editors?

Just curious, are there any writers that started as Wikipedia editors early in their career?--Lenticel ^(talk) 05:20, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Come back and ask that again in ten or twenty years. Wikipedia hasn't been around long enough for notable writers who attribute their becoming writers to wikipedia to have developed "careers". μηδείς (talk) 18:49, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Good point --Lenticel ^(talk) 02:42, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

The question seems to depend on some pretty narrow definition of writer, perhaps to mean the same as novelist. I would argue that a lot of the better editors here are already writers. HiLo48 (talk) 23:02, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Well technically we're all writers here. Yeah, I was thinking more in the vein of novelist and/or journalists. --Lenticel ^(talk) 02:42, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

There are various writers who were notable writers before Wikipedia who have edited Wikipedia. Given my respect for them and their problems with th project and a strict respect for WP:BLP I will avoid commenting on them. μηδείς (talk) 02:55, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Three Wikipedians collaborated to write How Wikipedia Works, does that count? I believe that it is Phoebe's only book and she is not generally a writer (aside from prolific Wikimedia contributions), but I'm not sure about the other two coauthors. I think Wikipedia – The Missing Manual is another example of a Wikipedian who is not otherwise a writer publishing a book about Wikipedia. Dragons flight (talk) 03:16, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

It is possible that participation in this project could facilitate one's propensity for verbal expression. Bus stop (talk) 00:49, 18 April 2013 (UTC)

Dewey Decimal Classification: Is it accurate?

I was just looking at the DDC for Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism when I noticed it was classified under Class 600 – Technology > 640 Home economics & family living > 641 Food & drink. I find this very strange. The book has nothing to do with technology, home economics, family living, nor food and drink. It has to do with the psychology of eating meat. Why wasn't this book classified under Class 100 – Philosophy and psychology or Class 300 – Social sciences instead? Viriditas (talk) 06:16, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

There will often be subjective decisions to make in classifying, with the person responsible needing to take a view on where something fits best. Looking through the alternative, there's no obvious subcategory in List_of_Dewey_Decimal_classes#Class_100_.E2.80.93_Philosophy_and_psychology, the closest being the Ethics of consumption, but that's not about eating.

As a user, I'd expect to find the book in a food and drink-related subcategory, which is where it's been put and I think they therefore probably judged it about right. But as, like I say, it's a subjective decision, it's easy to disagree. Incidentally, it may not be about "technology" or "home economics", but I think you're pushing the case too hard by arguing that it's not about "family living" or "food and drink". I think it is... although I agree it's also about psychology.

If you'll forgive what you might perceive as a strawman argument, would you expect to find a book about the psychology of sales and marketing in psychology or 659 Advertising & public relations? --Dweller (talk) 09:52, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Have a look also at Cataloguing#Standards. SemanticMantis (talk) 15:09, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

The real problem is not Dewey Decimal - it's the requirement that a bricks-and-mortar library glue a number to the spine of the book and place it on a specific shelf. No matter what system you use, some books would be equally at home on multiple shelves - but that's impossible. In a modern electronic world, a library *could* just number and shelve books in the order they got them: 000001, 000002, 000003, etc and provide a set of many Dewey decimal numbers that might apply to each one - and to provide a computerized search engine to allow readers to find a suitable book when they need it. Such a system would have solved your problem for you - so the problem clearly isn't with the classification system itself. Your criticism more properly lies with the way the library employed it. SteveBaker (talk) 15:29, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm a cataloguer who uses Dewey in real life, and Dewey sucks. It's impossible to reduce all the world's knowledge into neat categories, so many compromises need to be made to make it work. It's as simple as that, and since this book does discuss animals as food, it could easily go there. That said, we make mistakes. Even so, it's not like those mistakes are devastating: as long as it is placed in order, it could be labelled with any number we want and it'll get found if someone wants it. Mingmingla (talk) 15:42, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Libraries quite often do what is know as copy cataloging, where instead of creating an original bibliographic record of a book for their catalog, they copy one from an authoritative source -- the Library of Congress, the British Library, &c. -- and make modifications (or not) to suit their local needs. So somewhere, someone sat and considered what subject of the book most closely was and gave it a call number based on that, and other libraries followed suit. This is a good thing in that whatever library one walks into the book is likely to be more or less on the same place on the shelf, rather than being in the 600s one place, 100s another, &c. Sometimes classification is cut and dry, and sometimes it's not. The Autobiography of Malcolm X can be classified in E185: Afro Americans -- Status and Development since Emanicipation or BP223: Islam (those are the LC call numbers, which I'm more familiar with), and can be found in either place depending on the library, or in some libraries, both places. The idea is to get each book to place on the shelf where its subject most closely matches those of its neighbors, which was especially important before cataloging was computerized and the only three access points one had for searching were title, author, and subject. --some jerk on the Internet (talk) 16:01, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

zooming in on the Koch curve

• The point of the system is not some sort of Platonic ideal of accuracy, but of having books in similar topics grouped near one another on the shelf. If a book is totally unique it doesn't matter where it is shelved. So long as all three books on food psychology end up next to each other it doesn't matter if they end up under food or psychology. Book shelves are one dimensional, a book is either to the right or the left of another. Conceptual classification has an infinite number of possible dimensions. No categorization system using shelves could possibly adjacently map an infinitely accurate categorization according to all possible classes onto a one-dimensional sequence. μηδείς (talk) 18:58, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

I've never heard it put like that. Kudos, Medeis. That's a really good visualization. Mingmingla (talk) 21:25, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks, especially as it comes from a professional. Since you are interested, Dewey Decimal and other systems do actually approximate higher dimensions by using fractal nested groupings, with author's last name and date of publication, for example, determining the smallest divisions. These smaller subdivisions are like the bends in a Koch curve, increasing the classifications fractal dimension above strictly linear. μηδείς (talk) 21:40, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Similar topics are shelved in the 170 Ethics (Moral philosophy) class. This seems to be a clear case of misclassification. "Food and drink" is clearly an error. Viriditas (talk) 00:22, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

• I'm late to this party, but as a professional cataloger that even had a small role in developing the most recent iteration of Dewey, I can speak with some authority on this question. First of all, I think Viriditas is right about this book being classified wrong. It probably belongs in 179.3 (Other ethical norms--Treatment of animals, which has a scope note "Including ethics of hunting; vegetarianism"), although it's often very difficult to catalog or classify a book correctly without being able to inspect it personally. Don't read too much into the broader labels like "Technology" for the 600 class, though—the caption on the specific number is important. This particular book was classified by a professional at the Library of Congress, and unfortunately in cases like this, most libraries will just accept the LC-assigned Dewey number than making a new one locally. --BDD (talk) 22:11, 16 April 2013 (UTC)

USA Baseball world titles

A comment made on one of the Ref Desks the other day made me look into the performance of the USA in baseball's world championships. The first thing I found was that there have been three different tournaments in which countries participate, now regularised to one, with a merger and the discontinuation of the sport in the Olympic programme.

One of the few things that is consistent in the tangled history is that the performance of the USA in all three different competitions is astonishingly poor. Even if the country sent second-rate baseball players to represent them, I'd have expected at the very least a rash of silver and bronze performances, with an occasional gold thrown in.

Without going into excessive debate, is there a simple reason or reasons why the USA has performed so poorly? Has any RS (especially a heavyweight sport or news title) written an article on the subject?

Cheers, --Dweller (talk) 09:09, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Most of international baseball is played, if not by amateur players, at least by players not playing in Major League Baseball. This is the case even when the tournaments are open to professionals. This causes a disadvantage for the United States, because a very large percentage of its best players are either in MLB, or in the 5 tiers of minor leagues below it. Major League teams will almost never allow players to take a leave of absence to take part in international competitions, and this applies to top prospects in the minor leagues as well. Which leaves college players and non-prospects as the core players on the national team in most competitions. One exception is the World Baseball Classic, in which major league teams do allow some (but not all) of their star players to take part. The second disadvantage is that there is no true "national team" program in the USA, which means that whichever players are assembled for a specific competition have no experience of playing together as a team. While team play in baseball may not be as crucial as football or some other sports, it is still a problem. That situation is largely unique to the USA, as other countries who face the same problem with their best being in MLB, such as Canada, or who have very good professional leagues of their own like Japan and South Korea, have a national team program which means that their teams are always built around the same core of players, and thus play as teams, not merely as collections of talented individuals. Finally, the lack of good results has not encouraged players to commit to playing for the USA over the long term. The turnover in the Team USA roster between the 2009 and 2013 editions of the WBC was huge; it would help a lot if there was a core of players that could be relied on. --Xuxl (talk) 13:27, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks. I'm surprised there's no public outcry forcing the sport's administrators in the US to do something about it, much like the pressure on England's football and cricket administrators when our national football and cricket teams have failed. Then again, there is the meme of traditional American isolationism, which if true, would mean that the public wouldn't care if the nation's baseball team performs badly on the world stage. --Dweller (talk) 15:21, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

From the American perspective, oversimplifying only slightly, MLB is baseball. Even the college game is mostly ignored except by friends and families of the players. International baseball? Sure, there's the Toronto Blue Jays. --Trovatore (talk) 18:31, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

How many native Canadians play on the Blue Jays, eh? MLB is the top level of international baseball. It includes the best American, Latino and Asian players. The reason the USA does not do well in the WBC is that most of the players figure they have more important things to do - like getting ready for the MLB regular season. The last thing they need is to get injured in a meaningless exhibition contest... like the WBC. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 14:42, 14 April 2013 (UTC)

I was listening to an episode of Only A Game on NPR just after the Classic was played this year when they said that the American players weren't given much time at all to practice together. Dismas|^(talk) 01:40, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

The WBC is a fairly big deal in other baseball playing countries except the U.S., like Japan, South Korea, or the Dominican Republic. There was a lot of discussion about this this past March on the sports talk shows in the U.S. It was noted that TV viewership numbers in those countries were huge, comparable to major championships in the U.S. like the Super Bowl or the NCAA Tournament. In the U.S., it was only covered on two networks: the MLB Network, which most people probably couldn't find on their cable lineup even if their system carried it, and in Spanish on ESPN Deportes. The lack of a major network partner is both a symptom of, and a cause of, the lack of interest in it (with no interest, no one wants to carry it. With no one carrying it, no one really can watch it). Besides the facts noted by several people that major American stars don't play, or if they do, they don't play together long enough to gel as a team, another big problem is that the WBC overlaps some with the 2013 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament, while it gets done before the round of 64 gets started, there was some consensus among the talking heads on the Sports talk shows this year that most people were too busy setting up their NCAA brackets to pay much attention to the World Baseball Classic. --Jayron32 02:27, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Plot

There is no plot section in trance(2013 film) why? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.112.186.146 (talk) 11:26, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

You haven't written it yet?

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 why you might want to). --Dweller (talk) 11:47, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

A friend of mine who's seen Trance was of the opinion there is no plot.--TammyMoet (talk) 18:21, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

flag identification

Got a glimpse of a flag yesterday, randomly curious about where it belongs to, don't have eidetic memory of it, however: it was divided into quarters, the lower left and top right quarters contained (identical) fields of fleur de lis, smallish, maybe same order of magnitude as stars in the US flag; the top left and bottom right feature what looked like three (each) vertically stacked crocodiles. i think the crocodile part had an orange background, but maybe it was the fleur de lis part; maybe neither.. anybody recognize this? thanks. Gzuckier (talk) 17:06, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

The excellent database at Flagid.org rendered me these results for flags in quarters with any shade of yellow: ([1]) None really match your description but I was kind of hoping it was the Detroit one and your memory is really faulty. --Dweller (talk) 17:23, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Surely not the :Royal Standard of England (1406-1603)? I suppose that the lion's front paws could look a bit like crocodile's jaws. Alansplodge (talk) 17:30, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

Belay that: the Royal Standard of England (1389-1406) is an even closer match. Alansplodge (talk) 17:40, 12 April 2013 (UTC)

ah, and that it is. as you suspected, i can't tell a lion from a crocodile. also somehow it was reversed when i saw it, although i swear the staff was on the left... thank you. Gzuckier (talk) 00:51, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

For what it's worth, those arms are extremely well known. You have the symbol of France (the fleur de lis) cross with the symbol of the Plantagenet kings (the three crouching lions). They represent the fact that Edward III believed he was the legitimate heir of both the French and English monarchies, and so in a sense they are the reason for the Hundred Years' War. Looie496 (talk) 00:58, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

I'm rather curious now about why it was being flown. Alansplodge (talk) 01:08, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

The claim to France was not dropped from the title of British monarchs until 1801, during the reign of George III. I'm sure most Australians are not aware that when James Cook claimed the east coast of New Holland for Britain in 1770, the claim was being made in the name of a king who claimed to be King of France. Alors! Vive l'Australie!-- Jack of Oz ^[Talk] 02:01, 13 April 2013 (UTC) (or, if you prefer, Jacques d'Oz)

darned if I know why it was flown; it was on a flagpole sticking out of a house, in connecticut. maybe somebody asserting a claim to the throne now that Queen Maggie has passed on. Gzuckier (talk) 08:41, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Probably one of many who claim to be descended from the Plantagenets and therefore ought to be king. A descendant of Richard III has been tracked down in Canada and has provided a DNA sample to help identify the corpse found in a car park.[2] Alansplodge (talk) 19:04, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

Well it is a standard, not a country flag. It indicates the position of the King. So it means the the Monarch of England and France was there. --Lgriot (talk) 11:46, 15 April 2013 (UTC)

Or (more likely) somebody who thinks that they ought to be the Monarch of England and France. Alansplodge (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2013 (UTC)